Since it’s only pop music, maybe they don’t.  Hot Fuss had no pretensions to be anything other than a good ‘ole fashioned 80s pop album.  But the Killers did don beards, cowboy boots, and Springsteen arrangements for Sam’s Town, which seemed to signal a serious attempt at seriousness.  Flowers asserted that the album was a sort of homecoming for the band, a retreat from the Manchester dance-rock of their debut to their native Nevada desert.  They wanted to sound American, and for them that meant adopting models closer to Springsteen and Petty songs.

You could argue well into the night about the integrity of “When You Were Young,” which sounds an awful lot like “Born to Run,” but before you do consider this:  Brandon Flowers is a Mormon.

Unlike Mitt Romney’s presidential bid, this fact necessitates a change in analysis of the product.  Sam’s Town is guilty of many lyrical cliches, but taken in the context of Flowers’ experiences, some of them actually hold water.  They come fast and furious in “When You Were Young,” for example.  When you hear “They say the devil’s water, it tastes so sweet/You don’t have to drink right now/But you can dip your feet/Every once in a little while” you think, “Right.  The Boss.”  But when you consider his Mormon faith alongside his Dior suits, you might think he sounds more and more like a backsliding Mormon playing coy, which, frankly, is kind of a novel idea.

“Read My Mind,” probably the best song of their young careers, begins as a Springsteen retread with arid keyboards and images of “Main Street” but then quickly unveils some lyrical gems like “Slippin’ in my faith until I fall/You never returned that call/Woman, open the door/I wanna breath that fire again.”  The issue of how to reconcile his faith (which he still openly observes) with the rock n’ roll lifestyle is blurted out so melodramatically that it’s inspiring.  The soul-searching sounds contrived at other moments, like on the puzzling “Bling (Confessions of a King),” but it sounds genuine here, and the clumsy poetry of that line only adds to its conviction. 

To the extent that the sophomore slump does exist, it tends to show up in weary lyrics about the toils of fame and such.  Facing a religious crisis seems a little more legitimate.

“This River is Wild,” the album’s climax, wraps itself around the same kind of sentiment in the build-up to each chorus:  “I’ve been trying hard to do what’s right/But you know I could stay here all night.”  Later he admits “Sometimes I’m nervous when I talk (I shake a little!)/Sometimes I hate the line I walk.”  This doesn’t sound like the Brandon Flowers getting into cat fights with Sam Endicott of the Bravery.  He counters some of the grandeur and messy indulgences on this record with doses of humility, at least to the extent that he’s willing to publicly expose himself as a fraud as well as the self-loathing that accompanies that revelation. 

Its weaknesses are glaring, but I don’t think Sam’s Town can be fairly criticized as an impersonal stadium album, as indeed it was tagged.  It is in fact a uniquely personal album in that it manages to graft an instantly recognizable framework - that of the Boss and U2 - onto a perspective alien to most of us.  As he was on Hot Fuss, Flowers is the star of his own musical here (check out the Judy Garland/gospel hybrid “Why Do I Keep Counting?”), but there’s a glimmer of soul that wasn’t there before.  Sam’s Town appears to be the album that he needed to get out of his system in order to justify a prolonged career in the music business, and the Killers do appear to have longevity in mind. 

The fact that Flowers is eager to enlist anyone willing to listen will only help him.  In cinematic opener “Sam’s Town,” he defines the terms of success for his band, and it’s endearing in a bratty kind of way:  “‘Why do you waste my time?’ is the answer to the question on your mind/Well I’m sick of all my judges so scared of letting me shine/But I know that I can make it/As long as somebody takes me home every now and then . . .”