Rocktrospectiva: The Cult-Classic "Sam's Town" Turns 20

 

Released on 27 September 2006 "Sam's Town" was the 2nd., studio album by the US rock band The Killers. Frontman Brandon Flowers noted that he "wanted to create an album that captured, chronologically, everything important that got me to where I am today". The album spawned four singles "When You Were Young", Read My Mind", "Bones" & "For Reasons Unknown."

The album took its name from Sam's Town Hotel and Gambling Hall, a hotel and casino in Las Vegas, the band's hometown. Sam's Town was also a huge sign that was visible to band member Mark Stoermer through his room window when he was young. The album is said to be influenced by the works of U2, Duran Duran, Bruce Springsteen, the Beatles, Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers, Electric Light Orchestra, and Dire Straits, among others.

Flowers later said of production techniques used on the record, "We didn't use too many vocal effects. On the first album, we used auto-tune, and I didn't even realize what was going on with these machines and the computer. I was adamant about not using it this time. You really hear what my voice sounds like, for the first time." At one point, Flowers was told that Brian Eno had passed over the chance to produce the album, a rejection that affected Flowers greatly. However, when working with Eno for Wonderful Wonderful, Eno told him that he was never offered the project in the first place

At the time of its release, Sam’s Town was not nearly as beloved, to put it mildly. A loosely conceptual musical tour of the band’s hometown of Las Vegas bookended with "Enterlude" and "Exitlude" tracks, Sam’s Town was widely dismissed as an overblown and pretentious misfire. In his two-star review, Rolling Stone‘s Rob Sheffield compared the Killers unfavorably to Rob Lowe’s band in St. Elmo’s Fire (because Rob Sheffield is the best), and mocked the lyrics to the album's first single, "When You Were Young," in which Brandon Flowers sings about “Burning down a highway skyline / On the back of a hurricane.”

Since then, Sam’s Town has become something of an under-appreciated sorta-classic. Rolling Stone‘s readers rebelled against Sheffield’s review by voting Sam’s Town the decade’s most underrated album. Flowers himself claimed in a 2015 interview that "there’s a reverence for our second record. It really connected with people in a way the other ones didn't."

Initially, Sam's Town received generally positive reviews from music critics, and some critics pointed a certain similarity to "Born To Run" by Bruce Springsteen, others found certain similarities to Hot Fuss and the evolution of the band's sound from the debut to Sam's Town. But on the other hand, certain critics called the album "painful" and ends the review with the statement that "The Killers are a talented band that evolved too fast, for the wrong reasons."

In later years, the album gained a cult following and has been critically lauded as a classic and one of the best rock albums of the 2000s. Despite its two-star rating by Rolling Stone, Sam's Town was voted by the magazine's readers in December 2009 as the most underrated album of the decade. In a retrospective for Uproxx, Steven Hyden broaches the issue of pannings by notable media outlets such as Rolling Stone, arguing that these pannings have ultimately cemented the album's status as a classic: "Ten years removed from its original moment, Sam's Town has aged as all misunderstood sorta-classics do, where its deficiencies are now strengths.

 

Sam's Town Track List: 

 

1. Sam's Town

2. Enterlude

3. When You Were Young

4. Bling (Confession Of A King)

5. For Reasons Unkwnown

6. Read My Mind

7. Uncle Jonny

8. Bones

9. My List

10. The River Is Wild 

11. Why Do I Keep Counting?

12. Exitlude