Instead of being blandly polished, The Killers come off sounding like an excited young band with something to prove.
If you’ve the stomach to set aside your indie sensibilities and endure the occasional terrifying flashback to ‘(Everything I Do) I Do It For You’, ‘Battle Born’ holds some majestic moments.
Battle Born forges deeper into their distinctive traits and away from the compromises with radio or current trends
If you already don’t buy into The Killers, you’ll probably find Battle Born even more bloated, ridiculous, and over-the-top than anything else they’ve ever done.
Battle Born is music played in the past tense. Perfect, imperfect, pluperfect. Mostly imperfect.
After making it big off the back of a Murder Trilogy, The Killers seem at a loss as to where they’re heading next.
The tragedy of Battle Born is that even when it shouts at the top of its lungs, it never reaches that special place that the band accidentally trips into with their best material.
When you add it all up, Battle Born is a confused mess of an album, drenched in influences but positively overextended in its execution, the band trying way too hard to do something grander and more complex than what they’ve done before.