The Daily Spin, September 7
Sam's Town | The Killers
Welcome back to the Daily Spin, the series in which I review 365 albums during 2023. 250 down - what a massive milestone. Thank you all!
Each album will be given a rating on a scale from 0 to 10. You can look at the entire set here. Additionally, you can check out a list of my favorite song from each album right here.
Album: Sam’s Town (2004)
Artist: The Killers
Link: Â
Â
Classically early-2000s rock, anthemic to the point of becoming party and festival icons even today, The Killers are best known for their work off of Hot Fuss, released two years prior and featuring one of the most popular songs ever made with ‘Mr. Brightside’.Â
With Sam’s Town, that power-rock anthemic feel doesn’t really come through nearly as often, but I don’t think that’s necessarily to the album’s detriment. We’ll talk more about Hot Fuss later, but one of the drawbacks to a song so utterly dominant is that the rest of the album can fade into ceaseless noise as you wait for the orbit to cycle back around, while with Sam’s Town, there exists a more consistent footprint for the group to get stuck in with.Â
The clear star of the show is when they do dive back towards that powerful, angsty feel, with ‘When You Were Young’ a devastatingly powerful song about heartache and loss that remains my favorite Killers song by a wide margin. Not three songs later, they follow it up with another personal favorite in ‘Read My Mind’, another choice where they get a little more serious and it pays massive dividends.Â
That seems to be the central conflict to this record - it wouldn’t hit so hard if the entire album had those heavy connotations, but it’s also clearly what the group is best at - so how do you balance it? Through Sam’s Town, I think the Killers have accomplished that about as well as can be reasonably expected.Â
Rating: 8.1/10
Best Tracks: When You Were Young; Read My Mind
Worst Tracks: Bling