Brandon Flowers: Thrasher review – Killers frontman’s country pivot is a rootin’ tootin’ cowboy-bootin’ hoot!

(Island) Even a couple of bafflingly misguided social commentary songs can’t detract from the joys of Flowers’ classically full-throated commitment to the Nashville bit Here are three immutable facts about Brandon Richard Flowers: he was born just outside Las Vegas, Nevada. He is 45 years old. And he never does anything by halves. When he and his band the Killers debuted in the early 2000s, as disaffected New York cool was on the rise, he was writing scream-along choruses sung in his upper register. When the Killers were searching for a sound even bigger and grander than the euphoric Springsteen pastiche of 2006’s Sam’s Town, they didn’t think twice before recruiting Stuart Price to produce the spangly 2008 disco-rock record Day & Age. That’s how you get a record like Thrasher. Flowers’ third solo album finds Vegas’s chosen son decamping to Nashville for a full-throated exploration of country music – not subtle, trendy Americana, but rip-snorting, honky-tonking, Nudie suit-wearing country. In many ways, Thrasher is a stylistic follow-up to the Killers’ maudlin 2021 Pressure Machine, which saw Flowers explore windswept balladry and tasteful story-songs. But that record was as forgettable as Thrasher is a hoot; Flowers wilts when he doesn’t fully commit, as was the case on Pressure Machine, and he doesn’t make that mistake here. Thrasher features many of Nashville’s most revered country musicians, including pedal steel legend Bruce Bouton, 85-year-old harmonica player Charlie McCoy, Gillian Welch’s musical partner Dave Rawlings and lauded Americana musician Margo Price. Continue reading...