As keen students of the era that spawned Ultravox, the Killers will no doubt remember the video to the group’s 1982 hit Hymn, which seeks to retell the Faust story through the medium of synth-pop. Here, a shadowy figure with green contact lenses presents various members of Ultravox with a contract that promises untold riches. Even Midge Ure, playing a journeyman pub rocker, isn’t immune to such Satanic overtures. As the video ends, we see him propelled to the dizzy heights of stardom with his universally adored 1980s sounds.

God knows what happened to Ultravox, but if the Killers’ second album is anything to go by, the guy with the green contact lenses has landed a plum job as Mercury’s head of A&R. Before its release, much has been made of the frontman Brandon Flowers’s epiphanic transformation from mascara-eyed authority on the UK post-punk scene to Bruce Springsteen convert. Now the Las Vegas quartet have facial hair where once there was none, while Flowers’s trenchcoat-and-beads get-up positively reeks of Boss. Sure enough, This River Is Wild, the new single When You Were Young and the album’s breathlessly romantic highlight Bones reflect that change.

The way Flowers tells it though, it all amounts to a rediscovery of the American dream. “Most of the (new) songs are about getting to that place,” he recently told NME, “of making it to the promised land. And that idea runs through the record.” This, of course, is just the kind of thing that ambitious pop stars have to say when they have just made a record all about its own desire to be successful. “I’ve got this energy beneath my feet/ Like something underground’s gonna come up and carry me,” declares the singer on the stampeding title track, gripped by a zeal common only to people who presume that they must look as thrilling to 30,000 fans as 30,000 fans look to them.

It’s some small mercy, at least, that the group’s embrace of Americana sits easily with the Brit-loving elements that distinguished 2004’s Hot Fuss. Fans of 1980s vista-rock practitioners — Echo & the Bunnymen; the supersized Cure of Kiss Me Kiss Me Kiss Me; inevitably, U2 — will warm to the titanic self-belief that allows Bling (Confessions of a King) and My List to bypass anything resembling a whistleable melody. Listen to them alone in your house and Flowers’s epically meaningless exhortations — “higher and higher/ We’re gonna take things down to the wire” — will feel a bit sleazy; on the way to Sainsbury’s in the car, they’ll seem amusingly incongruous; on some vertiginous coastal road in the Scottish Highlands they’ll probably sound halfway decent.

Given that no one ever ends up sounding like this accidentally — the producers Flood and Alan Moulder clearly understood what was required — it seems churlish to point out that Sam’s Town offers little emotional nourishment. The Killers’ determination to pack stadiums is fine. At some level that’s clearly what Bruce and Bono also wanted. But what for those artists was a means is for the Killers an end. This, ultimately, is what their Big Idea boils down to. They just want you to look at them.

Mercury

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