Album review: Pressure Machine, by The Killers - watertight songs depart from their arena bombast
Brandon Flowers of The Killers. Picture: Taylor Hill/Getty Images
★★★☆☆
Everyone has a lockdown album in them. Or so we must conclude as The Killers follow in the footsteps of Taylor Swift, Charli XCX and Nick Cave with Pressure Machine. Assembled during the hollowed-out months of mid-2020, it’s a concept record about… well, where to start?
One of the things it’s about is frontman Brandon Flowers’s devotion to Bruce Springsteen. He’s tapped into the fandom previously, on 2006’s Sam’s Town and the single When We Were Young.
But if that record was The Killers doing Born To Run, this is Flowers buying a one-way ticket to the monochrome miserablism of Nebraska. It draws on Flowers' upbringing in Nephi, a remote Utah town plagued by the sorts of demons that tend to coalesce around remote American towns.
So the vibe is Winter’s Bone or Mare of Easttown with a soundtrack by the E-Street Band. Never one for understatement, Flowers strains throughout for big emotional payoffs. On West Hills he steps into the shoes of a backwoods heroin dealer, singing “They got me for possession of enough to kill/ the horses that run free in the west hills.”
Flowers later delves into Hicksville homophobia, the opioid epidemic and the claustrophobia of life in a tightly-knit community.
Interwoven with the music are snippets of recordings from real-life natives of Nephi. This gives the LP a curious ambient quality – like listening to Coldplay trying to be Godspeed You Black Emperor.
As a departure from The Killers’ arena bombast, Pressure Machine isn’t entirely successful. While the songs have clearly been put together with care, and are melodically watertight, Flowers lyrics can’t quite bear the weight of the misery.
The Phoebe Bridgers’ duet Runaway Horses, for instance, opens with Flowers crooning “Small town girl, Coca Cola grin, honeysuckle skin.”
It’s closer to Journey’s More Than A Feeling than Springsteen’s The River. No matter how hard he tries to go dark, Flowers in the end cannot keep his inner Mr Brightside under wraps.
