Stone-Free Radicals | The Killers

Dec 1, 2008 12:00 PM, By Bill Murphy

THE KILLERS TEAM UP WITH PRODUCER STUART PRICE TO MURDER ALL EXPECTATIONS ON THEIR RETRO-GLAM ROCK OPUS, DAY & AGE

Brandon Flowers jumps to his feet again and hits the volume on the nearby flat screen. “That's it — he's having him for lunch,” he marvels, his dark eyes fixed on the two figures duking it out in front of 40,000 rabid fans. “I feel bad for the kid. He's young and he'll get another shot, but he's gotta be scared to death to be out there now.”

Boxing match? Mixed martial-arts smackdown? Not even close. We're watching the men's final of the U.S. Open, where Roger Federer is giving the young Scot upstart Andy Murray a thorough shellacking. At first it seems a little weird that Flowers, frontman for one of the biggest rock bands in America, would even give professional tennis the time of day. But then it sinks in: The Killers share their hometown with Andre Agassi, a living legend of the game. Maybe Las Vegas isn't just about casinos, cowboys and crime scenes after all.

There's certainly more than meets the eye to the band's latest album. Whereas their 2006 sophomore outing, Sam's Town, produced by Flood with Alan Moulder, transmuted the synth-pop bluster and rock star potential of Flowers and his bandmates — guitarist Dave Keuning, bassist Mark Stoermer and drummer Ronnie Vannucci — into an epic slab of sonic hugeness worthy of the Next Big Thing, Day & Age (Island, 2008) actually manages to expand the scope even further. It comes through in the galactic synth and guitar washes of “Spaceman,” the throwback glam-funk beat that drives “Losing Touch,” or the left-field harp and Caribbean steel drums (that's right: steel drums) that spice up the Bowie-esque “I Can't Stay.” Simply put, The Killers have tapped a way-out rebel seam — a devil-may-care vibe — that has a lot to do, no doubt, with the thrill of recording for the first time in their new Battle Born Studios.

To be sure, it's a buzz that can only get better when you have London-based producer Stuart Price riding the faders and tweaking the LFOs. Known for his marquee work with pop royalty (Madonna, Seal, New Order), but also in particular for his own indie projects (Zoot Woman, Les Rythmes Digitales) and a spate of sharp remixes he's churned out over the years under his Thin White Duke alias, Price brings a mind-stretching, almost psychedelic ear to Day & Age. He loves his vintage synthesizers, compressors and outboard units, and has become a wizard at old-school recording techniques like re-amping and miking a room for natural reverb, but he's also equally attached to his computer.

“I don't think there's really any right or wrong in terms of whether you record an album wholly analog or wholly digital,” Price says, pointing out that even though he now has regular access to a high-end mecca like Olympic Studios in London (where Jimi Hendrix, the Rolling Stones, Led Zeppelin and Queen once recorded — and where Day & Age was finished and mixed), he's always been a bedroom producer at heart. “You have to pick and choose what's right at the time, but I think for this album, we got a really good blend of stuff that happened in the real world and in the digital world.”

FREQUENT FLYERS

It all started last year with a tour stop in London. At the time, Price was finishing mixes of “Sweet Talk,” a song that he'd taken up after the band's enthusiastic response to his Thin White Duke remix of “Mr. Brightside” from The Killers' 2004 Island debut, Hot Fuss. (“Sweet Talk” had its genesis in the Sam's Town sessions but ended up on the band's B-sides collection Sawdust [2007].)

“One night we had dinner with Stuart,” Flowers recalls, “and we didn't know if he was gonna do our next album or not, but I had a 4-track with me that I told him was like a mix of Pet Shop Boys and Johnny Cash. So I asked him, ‘What are you doing later?’ And the next thing I knew, me and Dave were back at his house recording tracks.”

These were the earliest takes of “Human,” an uptempo dancefloor anthem and the first single from Day & Age. The song gradually took shape as Price and the band, both working separately in Logic, continued to send new demo versions back and forth online via Apple iDisk while the band was on tour — an approach that worked so well, they applied it to the bulk of the songs that made the album. “It was like Christmas, checking your e-mail to see if he'd sent something back,” Flowers says. [Laughs.] “We'd never worked on preproduction like that before, so it was exciting.”

At his home studio (dubbed “50” for the street address where he lives), Price would often access his bank of vintage synths — including a Moog Polymoog, Korg MS-20, Roland SH-09 and a rare Rhodes Chroma — to add textures to a demo track or to supplement the Clavia Nord Lead 3 that Flowers uses as his main synth. “Brandon might say, ‘I really like the lushness of this sound,’ but he'd want to expand on it,” Price explains. “So I might work out a sound on one of the analog synths here and then send it back. Later on, when we finally got in the studio, I actually took a lot of my synths over with me.”

Price and the band spent six weeks at Battle Born, where they chose from more than 30 different demos and began fleshing out basic tracks for the album. Working on a new API 1608 console with Logic 8, an Apogee Symphony interface and a UAD-2 card (an early version sent to the band by Universal Audio), Price found that the relatively stripped-down setup was a blessing in disguise.

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