Album review: Brandon Flowers: Flamingo

Published on Friday 20 August 2010 12:08

BRANDON FLOWERS: Flamingo vertigo, £13.99 * * *

Some artists just can't take a break. After seven years of constant activity, the Killers announced earlier this year that they were going on hiatus. Fair enough. But their peacock of a frontman, Brandon Flowers, had other plans for his recreation time.

This first stab at a solo career came about more as an excuse to keep working on the batch of new songs he had written on tour, supposedly for the Killers' next album. Although ambivalent at first about making a solo record, the existence of Flamingo was eventually confirmed after a countdown on the Killers' website.

Flowers has subsequently been disarmingly honest about the making of his solo debut. Although he was apparently pleased with the results, it was not the liberating experience he had anticipated. He lost his mother to cancer at the start of the year. He missed his bros in the band. Although Killers drummer Ronnie Vannucci, whose own extra-curricular activity has included contributing to the new Mt Desolation album along with members of Keane and Mumford & Sons, appears on the album, Flowers has described the recording of Flamingo as a lonely process which has left him feeling exposed. See, there he is mooching about looking pensive in a swish but anonymous hotel room on the album cover. However, he's not so much of a reluctant solo flyer that he won't tour to promote the album.

The songs are all Flowers' work, so there's clearly some shared DNA with the Killers, but Flamingo is distinct from the band's braying indie rock anthems. As well as turning up the dial on those 80s FM rock references, with the emphasis on choruses you can drive to, and even adding a smattering of rootsy instrumentation, both of which you can hear on taster single Crossfire, there is no mistaking the influence of one of the three producers he chose to work with.

Daniel Lanois is best known for producing Flowers' heroes U2 during their glossy, bombastic mid-late 80s period. He smooths out wrinkles, airbrushes blemishes and generally turns out an immaculate product. This is just the ticket for Flowers' purposes. Portions of Flamingo, such as the bland synth AOR ballads Only The Young and Playing With Fire, definitely recall U2's snoozier moments.

The other chief inspiration for Flamingo is Flowers' home town, Las Vegas. The title is a tribute to Flamingo Road, Flowers' childhood stomping ground, the area where he got his first job and where he met his wife and the location of Sam's Town, the casino which gave its name to the Killers' second album. But this is neither an album of fond recollections nor glitzy celebration.

Although it takes Flowers less than a minute to roll out a reference to neon boulevards on the opening track, Welcome to Fabulous Las Vegas, titled after the second most famous place sign in the United States, the "fabulous" here is ironically applied. This is effectively a cautionary country song in the guise of an MOR rock number, warning against the city's insidious worship of money and its voracious chew-'em-up-and-spit-'em-out appetite with the baleful pay-off line: "Didn't nobody tell you the house will always win?"

He returns to the theme of the cruel city on Jilted Lovers and Broken Hearts, a song riddled with unsophisticated gambling metaphors though it compensates with one of the album's several big radio-friendly choruses, and just about succeeds in conjuring up some urban romanticism in the vein of Tom Petty.

Hard Enough is a featureless duet with Rilo Kiley frontwoman Jenny Lewis, who has flirted with ultra-commercial homogeneity in her time but whose solo career has been built on creating seductive old school country atmosphere. There's nothing so charming here. Kenny and Dolly they are not.

Playing With Fire is another soporific smooch, but this one is dressed up with a quavery-lipped Bryan Ferryesque appeal (Flowers does have a certain fearless dandy style, after all) and a dash of slide guitar. And there is plenty of personality (most of it borrowed from the Cars, it must be said) emanating from Was It Something I Said, an appealing New Wave pop jaunt about an Elvis chapel wedding gone awry.

Next, Flowers ventures west to California on the Hispanic-flavoured Magdalena and then to the deep south for the album's most surprising achievement. Flowers has said that closing track Swallow It is his proudest creation, but the epic gospel-infused appeal for redemption of On The Floor is really the track where the album's themes of greed, corruption and religion come together most seamlessly, and where Flowers sounds most comfortable - and justified - in going out on a limb without his bandmates.