Brandon Flowers goes solo

There have been lots of new releases this week, but one that especially caught my eye was ‘Crossfire’ by Killers front man Brandon Flowers. As a huge Killers fan I was very excited to see if Flowers could hold his own when the rest of the band decided to take a break. This single is the first from his debut solo album ‘Flamingo’, apparently named after a road in Las Vegas, the city where Flowers was bought up.

His first solo single has done pretty well in the charts, with ‘Crossfire’ landing at number eight, but this is to be expected due to his previous success with the killers, so is the song actually any good? Well yes, actually, with a catchy chorus and Flowers’ strong but vulnerable voice, it makes for quite a reasonable track. The lyrics don’t seem to make much sense, but at least they sound good together, which is the main thing.

The video is quite strange, and doesn’t really seem to have any particular point to it, but it’s doubtful anybody’s going to be taking much notice of that when you’ve got a battered and bruised, yet handsome Brandon Flowers and stunning movie star Charlize Theron to look at. With samurai swords and ninja warriors it does in fact look like a scene from a Hollywood movie.

Although it’s a perfectly good song, it’s not really different enough from The Killers songs for it to stand out as obviously just Flowers by himself. It doesn’t have the wow factor that the first Killers album did where pretty much every song on it was potentially a hit single, maybe he’ll have some great stuff on the rest of his ‘Flamingo’ album, but this didn’t blow me away like I hoped. Maybe after Flowers has finished experimenting with his solo career he’ll go back to The Killers and make some music that lives up to ‘Hot Fuss’, we can hope anyway.