Day & Age is the fourth album from the Las Vegas quartet The Killers, and follows on from last year’s B-side album Sawdust. Like how Sam’s Town was sonically different to their debut _Hot Fuss*, Day & Age is another evolutionary step for the band. Enlisting Stuart Price to twiddle the knobs, it’s produced some interesting results. Stuart Price is responsible for bands like Zoot Woman and Les Rythmes Digitales, remixes under the moniker Jaques Lu Cont and the Thin White Duke, amongst others, and can also claim to be the creator of the best Madonna album in 20 years, Confessions on a Dance Floor. Price’s brilliant remix of Mr Brightside was the reason the Killers chose the English producer, however the sound of that remix is generally absent on this album, with much of it focusing on orchestral and big band arrangements filled with strings, horns and woodwind instruments.

Before we go any further, I’ll share a little assumption with you. If you’re reading this review, you either love the Killers and you want to hear how great this album is, or you hate the Killers and you want to be reminded how much they suck. Well good news everybody…

The World We Live In is the song that sounds the most like you’d expect of the Killers and Stuart Price partnership, full of filter sweeps and big choruses, much better than single the Human, which features the god awful chorus of “Are we human? Or are we Dancer?” The xylophone (it could be a vibraphone, I’m no expert) in I Can’t Stay reminds me of a sample from an Avalanches album that will never get released. Joy Ride could be a lost Talking Heads song, full of saxophone, disco beats and funk bass.

The album feels like it begins full of hope, like a girl who’s come to Vegas to dance in a big production stage show. However the girl parties just a little too hard, everything is pushed to excess and she ends up as a boozy, makeup a smeared showgirl, crying her eyes out as the sun comes up, forcing her to fully realise how shallow her life really is repeating to her self the fading out lyric of “there’s nothing I can say now, there’s nothing I can do now.”

The album sounds very theatrical, as if a visual stage production was being calculated to correspond with each tune. Yet sounding like it’s recorded for large stadium shows the extra production begs the question of how the Killers plan on translating the bigger sounds to a live show with just their four members? With the band returning to Australia next year it will be interesting to see how much of sounds get performed live compared to samples from synths and backing tracks.