Brandon Flowers’ solo career does not unfold in parallel with the Killers. Some might have understood that his second album, the notable The Desired Effect, produced by Ariel Rechtshaid, was heading where the original band would no longer dare to go. Yet the third solo record from the frontman feels more like a continuation of the Killers’ latest efforts, the undervalued Imploding the Mirage and Pressure Machine, where Bruce Springsteen’s influence is very evident.
The Boss is present here as well, especially on ‘Tiger’s Blood’, although ‘THRASHER’ is predominantly a tribute to country music, recorded in Nashville, and featuring legendary collaborators such as Bruce Bouton (Garth Brooks) on the steel guitar, the octogenarian Charlie McCoy (Bob Dylan) on harmonica, David Rawlings (Gillian Welch) on guitar, and Margo Price on backing vocals, among many others. The conceit for this album, titled ‘TRILLADORA’—in all caps— is to recall the childhood Brandon spent in Nephi, a small Utah town of about 7,000 people, where he lived from age 8 to 16.
Nevertheless, it never quite becomes that intimate record through which we come to know Brandon Flowers better, for the lyrics are often filled with generalities, imagined situations, and above all, stories about other people. Completely disconnected from the world, ‘Does It Ever Cross Your Mind?’ speaks of the wonderful moment we’re living and of ‘how wonderful it is to be alive.’ ‘One of Us’, as a tribute to a deceased brother-in-law, includes lines of questionable taste (‘you made my sister a decent woman’), and The Guardian points to the interracial story in ‘Angel’ as ‘either racist or a critique of racism, though with equally condemnatory ambiguity.’
The tale of a Black athlete who marries a white girl without his family’s approval, and then ends up tangled in drugs with a gun in the middle, fails to become the new ‘In the Ghetto’ half a century later. Today it’s a cliché. As for the album’s production, it’s predictable even in the hands of Jonathan Rado, who shelves the edge and risk Foxygen used to apply. In ‘Paradise’, the track with prominent banjo that couldn’t be missing, a bell tolls after we hear the phrase ‘until the bell rang.’ That is the level.
Among the few confessional songs that break the mold, the moving ‘Miss Americana’ stands out, though the track loses some steam when you discover that, although sung in first person, the ‘Miss Americana’ who suffers sexual harassment at 12 is not Brandon Flowers but his sister. And among the production twists, the mariachi group Los Camperos de Jesús Chuy Guzmán deliver a lift to ‘Red Ground’, which already looked set to be one of the album’s highlights. ‘Take Me Back’ is one of the most stirring refrains on this record and the only one likely to be remembered in the future.
If Brandon Flowers had aimed to attract a tenth of Morgan Wallen’s audience, or back then Garth Brooks’, he has not. The album landed at 196 on the Billboard 200. If his goal was to let listeners know him a bit better and to be valued as a songwriter, the curious encounter with Elvis Presley in a Tesla depicted in ‘An American Dream’ wasn’t the way. Flowers’ best weapon remains his beautiful voice—always Roy Orbison-like. But for those of us who bought The Desired Effect vinyl in 2015 with much curiosity, the notion of going to a store to buy this album feels far-fetched.
