Brandon Flowers
Thrasher
ISLAND
It’s the hairpin skeptic in me who believes that one day soon, every arena rocker—young and old—will make a country album, as doing so moves units and wins heartland audiences by the bushelful. And yet there’s a generosity of spirit in me that admits how The Killers’ Brandon Flowers has always been something of a likely suspect when it comes to donning cowboy gear, weeping tears into beers, warbling softly beyond his crowd-surf crooning, dusting off the dirt of the Utah prairie, and finding a place in his Springsteen-obsessed narratives for real twang, tang, and yawning pedal steel.
Maybe it’s too on-the-nose that Flowers recorded his third solo album in Nashville with Music City studio vets Charlie McCoy, David Rawlings, and Bruce Bouton, aiming for a past-perfect C&W sound and earnest, emotional delivery more Conway and Tammy than Morgan and Ella. But that fine wine vintage means bells and whistles in its production, something more cinematic and stringed than ragged, and gives our hero the opportunity for subtlety and grace. How often Flowers takes full advantage of such an opportunity is debatable. “Does It Ever Cross Your Mind?” is an exceptional, loping opening number, one that sets the stage for Flowers to hucklebuck across freely without reservation (“One of Us”) and rhapsodize warmly about the dreams of youth and being “bound for the big show” ever since he was a boy in Vegas (“Plans”) later on the record.
By the time Flowers closes out his tab with “An American Dream,” that boy’s become a man—he’s gone and met his heroes and made a name for himself without having to leave the desert. That doesn’t negate the fact that Flowers just can’t clear the hurdle of Bruce adoration with dusty, overly dramatic ballads such as “Miss America” and trite tragedies such as “Angel” and “Tiger’s Blood” weighing down his flighty baritone, coming off like outtakes from Springsteen’s Electric Nebraska LP. And yet you can’t help but root for him to succeed, to find real solace in the soul of country music’s endearing passions and yearnings. He’s almost there. Maybe just put another quarter in the jukebox.
