The ennui of the modern retro rock band…

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[5.38]

Alfred Soto: Bagpipes, acoustic guitars, and piano –- a roots move with baggage? Reaffirming his status as the least convincing straight man to sport a mustache, Brandon Flowers writes a song about “blue-eyed girls playing in the sand” and about the kind of relationship in which staying up all night looking at the stars is considered more fruitful than going to bed early after listening to All That You Can’t Leave Behind and fighting about who has to take the car for an oil change in the morning. 
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Mallory O’Donnell: One of those rare moments in which parroting off the ’80s American rock cliches being not so much mined as mineshafted is even more tedious than listening to the thing. Sprinkle the usual 20-35% U2 on top and serve tepid.
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Brad Shoup: Can a house of vinyl gatefolds ever feel lived-in? Our boys can’t want to strike up the U2 parade, at least until the Steinman verse, or maybe the synth arpeggio that signifies pluperfect progression or something. It’s funny, but not as funny as the fact that I can lean into the hot air if I close my eyes.
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Jonathan Bogart: Aims for Springsteen, hits Tom Petty, mainly because Brandon Flowers’ voice doesn’t have the Boss’s gravitas. Unfortunately, he doesn’t have Petty’s slyness either.
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Will Adams: The chugging percussion and torched synth lines attempt to supplant the gloss that left with Stuart Price but don’t quite reach Day & Age‘s theatrical heights. Perhaps it doesn’t have to. Those small details, like the popcorn arpeggios at 2:19, are enough to prevent “Runaways” from sounding like a Springsteen tribute band’s opening number. (Keep in mind that my score reflects how few qualms I have with Springsteen tribute bands.)
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Patrick St. Michel: Brandon Flowers sounds best when he’s hamming it up as much as possible, and “Runaways” is the most stadium-ready tune The Killers have released since “When you Were Young.” Flowers takes the tired-and-true topic of domestic disintegration and blows it up to Deadwood levels of drama. 
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Anthony Easton: As the only human being over the age of 14 who really, really loved the Flowers solo record, I feel like I cannot ethically review this, but I just love it. The use of the phrase “unborn baby,” the first lines, the cack-handed glam remake of Springsteen at his least sophisticated, the weird sexual politics — it should all be terrible, but then the guitars squall and his voice is as expansive as the road from Barstow to Vegas, and getting married by Elvis at 3 a.m. seems charmingly self-aware as opposed to squalid and sad. 
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Jer Fairall: Brandon Flowers’ cheeseball Americana is a fact of life that isn’t likely to go away anytime soon, so best to just relax and enjoy what he and his band do well here: the earnest, croony vocals, the romance of young love and fatherhood and the road all painted in the broadest possible brushstrokes, the clear-eyed All That You Can’t Leave Behind-era U2 sprawl of the whole presentation. Enjoy, that is — not respect.
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