The Killers – Battle Born (Deluxe Edition) (2012)

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The Killers are apparently Mitt Romney’s favourite contemporary rock band, or at least the only one it is safe for the presidential candidate to mention. Like Conservative politicians in Britain, Republicans are at a disadvantage when it comes to advertising their music taste, at risk of being denounced by alternative bands unwilling to be associated with right-wing ideologies. The Killers, however, have proved unusually gracious.

“Anyone’s allowed to like us,” bassist Mark Stoermer responded. The association, of course, centres on singer and chief songwriter Brandon Flowers sharing Romney’s Mormon faith, but it may also run deeper. Despite their sinister name and edgy image, the Killers are an intrinsically conservative band.

Like Coldplay, Keane and Snow Patrol, their keyboard-driven pop rock has just enough modern sheen to flourish in a digital era when listeners are growing bored with guitars. Flush with stirring, singalong melodies, they construct exciting, catchy songs that draw on the dynamics of stadium rock established by classic bands from the Who (whose familiar sequencer-guitar mix is echoed on A Matter of Time) to Springsteen (whose spirit of epic, yearning Americana is evoked on Runaways and The Way it Was) and U2 (on Heart of a Girl, Flowers seems to be channelling Bono’s gospel roar). But it is not just in terms of sound that the Killers hark back to a bygone era.

Flowers’s lyrics centre on memory and loss, family and tradition, with the persistent theme that things were once better than they are now.