When the Killers' singer Brandon Flowers crossed the lobby of the Roosevelt Hotel in Hollywood before a recent taping of "Jimmy Kimmel Live," he displayed the first sign that the band was beginning anew: He lacked a mustache.
Around the time of the Killers' 2006 second album, "Sam's Town," Flowers grew a thick push broom worthy of that record's grandiloquent Americana. Drummer Ronnie Vannucci one-upped him with a fearsome Fu Manchu, and bassist Mark Stoermer let his blond scruff run wild. That album's unapologetic Springsteen-philia proved something of a critical brick, however, and Flowers' pronouncement that "Sam's Town" was "one of the best albums in the past 20 years" made the record ripe for dissenting opinions.
Those whiskers are gone now, and Flowers' preferred accessory for his "Kimmel" performance was a natty schoolboy jacket with feather epaulets. Guitarist Dave Keuning wore a barely there synthetic tiger-print shirt, and the band's stage setup was littered with glowing faux palm trees befitting its hometown of Las Vegas. The Killers' third studio album, "Day & Age," released Tuesday, is their furthest-reaching yet: a melange of Roxy Music saxophone pomp, roller-rink disco and jittery synth rave-ups supporting Flowers' newly surrealist lyrics.
Rock music is down to maybe a half-dozen bands who consistently reinvent themselves and still go platinum each time. But after their grand ambitions for "Sam's Town" met a fairly resounding shrug from tastemakers -- and moved about half of "Hot Fuss' " 3 million copies in the U.S. -- the question remains: Will the Killers' second attempt at an aesthetic makeover keep them in that ever-rarer clique?
"I let [those criticisms] affect me a lot," Flowers said. "But one thing we gained from it was that when we came back to the towns where those reviews were, we'd just play louder and we became a really great live band. It took that confidence to do what we did with this album."
In some ways, "Day & Age" feels like a direct riposte to the earnest and old-fashioned American arena rock ideals behind "Sam's Town." The new single "Human," a pillowy and remix-ready sliver of synth-pop, has already yielded one of 2008's most head-scratching and grammatically suspect choruses, now familiar to anyone who has spent time with rock radio recently: "Are we human / or are we dancer?"
