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First Night The Killers Royal Albert Hall, London ****
FEW MODERN bands - certainly few indie bands - have grasped the essential necessities of riff, hook and repetition quite as thoroughly as The Killers. Musically, they seem to evade definition, not by diversity of approach or genre-shifting sleights, but because there is little to actually pin down about their music.
Though they can slip smoothly between influences, as when those Springsteen-ish elements crept into their Sam's Town album like retrospective claims on some more "rooted" musical heritage, The Killers' sound is essentially a distillation of every stadium act from the past few decades. One can imagine Brandon Flowers poring over live albums, carefully selecting the most effective elements from Bruce Springsteen, U2, Simple Minds, Bon Jovi and the rest, creating blueprints for songs primed to explode and leave melodic...