The whole Vegas rock star shtick, the Killers frontman Brandon Flowers confessed upfront at the Royal Albert Hall, was a smokescreen. Behind it, the whole time, was a small-town kid pulled between his elder brother’s British indie rock records and the Merle Haggard and Waylon Jennings tunes his dad would blast out of the car stereo. “I spent a long time being embarrassed by that music,” he told the sold-out venue’s crowd, here to unearth the real Brandon Flowers on the London stop of a solo UK tour. “Tonight, I’m gonna play it to you.”
Flowers’s solo albums have always been depositories for more personal songs of faith and devotion than might suit the Killers. This year’s Thrasher* was his most exposed and revealing yet, laying bare intimate family secrets in a country-infused sequel to the Killers’ 2021 album *Pressure Machine, a stripped-back portrait of the singer’s Utah home town of Nephi.
Gracing the stage in a black Nashville suit and silver bolo tie, Flowers leant into country music’s storytelling tradition, giving poetic autobiographical introductions to the new album’s songs. Tiger’s Blood, a punchy canyon ballad reminiscing about a childhood friend now buried in Nephi, came with a story of Flowers’s dad teaching him to fight to fend off fourth-grade bullying. “Spoiler, it was hopeless,” he said. The sawdust strut of Paradise was framed with images of his cousin Bobby parking cars at the Luxor casino. Miss America, an open letter to an abusive husband steeped in campfire arpeggios and mournful longing, was prefaced with the thankful news that its protagonist, Flowers’s sister Shelly, “got the hell out of there”.
For all the evening’s down-home tones — its dust-coated harmonica and boot-slapping stomps — it was powerful stuff, transcending country by dint of Flowers’s inherent neon showmanship. If Angel was a menacing Morricone tale of a brother-in-law hitting “the road to ruin”, Magdalena was the redemptive road back, turbo-charged glory rock that had Flowers astride the monitors throwing Springsteen woah-woahs into the crowd.
An American Dream built to an anthemic shanty chorale, and the Killers songs peppering the last hour –— Read My Mind, In the Car Outside, an explosive When You Were Young — helped to elevate the Americana theme to roaring peaks while digging deep into the personal and musical roots of this enigmatic performer. “People asked when I started writing country,” Flowers said, before leaping back onto the monitors to summon the bombast from his 2010 solo debut single, Crossfire. “I said, ‘Sixteen years before anybody noticed.’”
★★★★★