This is where I lose the cool points – by giving Keane’s 2004 debut a better review than The Killers’ debut of the same year. Happily, I do so in the knowledge that there’s way worse to come in the fullness of time.
Is ‘Hot Fuss’ a bad album? No, not at all. Bits of it are good, and the good bits are actually superb. ‘Jenny Was A Friend Of Mine’, ‘Mr Brightside’, ‘Somebody Told Me’ and ‘All These Things That I’ve Done’ would have made an exemplary four-track EP. Add in ‘Smile Like You Mean It’, and the average quality would just about hold. Trouble is, that still only covers five tracks, and the first five at that. From there on in, the album takes a massive turn towards the mediocre. The remaining six tracks are just… there. They’re not awful, but they’re distinctly unmemorable. If they were spaced out a bit, maybe that wouldn’t matter, but they’re not, and it does.
It’s rare for an album to begin with such huge promise and end so far away from fulfilling that promise. I’ve not bought, or even bothered to listen to a Killers album since. But those first five tracks… if only they’d kept it up.
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