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May 10, 2009
The Killers at Mohegan Sun Arena
By Sean Spillane
STAFF WRITER
The Killers took over the Mohegan Sun Arena Saturday night and for the fans that packed the venue, it was an exhilarating evening. Especially for those in the general-admission area in front of the stage, where there were no seats set up to get in the way of the dancing.
And it was hard for many of the people with seats to stay in them for long as the dance-rock band from Las Vegas delivered a high-energy concert that never seemed to let up for an instant.
Touring in support of its latest album, “Day & Age,” The Killers has stepped away a bit from the anthem rock of its previous record, “Sam’s Town,” for the glitzier synth-pop sound of its debut record, “Hot Fuss.”
Saturday’s show touched on all three discs – six songs from each – but you would be hard-pressed to tell which songs were five years old and which ones were new. Each of the older songs had a fresh feel to it, enlivened by musicians who have had no trouble making the leap from theaters to larger arenas.
It could have been a taxing night, as The Killers went from song to song, wasting no time with any inane stage patter. If you need a band to tell you how great it is to be in [insert your town here], this wasn’t the show for you.
This was a full-out rock extravaganza and very rarely did the group take its foot off the gas and play a slow song. In fact, a re-worked version of the song “Sam’s Town,” with singer Brandon Flowers performing the first half basically solo, was the only one that could have qualified as a “slow” song, but it didn’t last too long. Soon enough, his bandmates jumped in to help him finish the song and to get the crowd moving again.
Not that it took much. This was a crowd that was involved from the opening note of the new song “Human” until the concert closed 90 minutes later with the group’s 2006 hit “When You Were Young.”
Many times, all Flowers had to do was hold his microphone out to the fans and they would oblige him by singing a verse here and a chorus there. New song or old, it didn’t matter to this group of The Killers’ “victims.”
One tune they might not have been too familiar with was the show’s lone cover song, Joy Division’s “Shadowplay.” The Killers’ version of the song only appeared on “Sawdust,” a 2007 collection of B-sides and other unreleased tracks.
Chairlift, a Brooklyn-based band, was a smart choice as an opening act. The synth-pop trio – whose song “Bruises” featured in an iPod nano commercial – was a good warm-up for the fans that bothered to enter the arena before The Killers came on stage.
The contrasting vocals of guitarist Aaron Pfenning and keyboardist Caroline Polachek made for a nice mix of moody (Pfenning) and dreamy (Polachek) singing, often in the same numberd. Chairlift’s new record, “Does You Inspire You,” is definitely worth a listen.
The set list
Human/This is Your Life/Somebody Told Me/For Reasons Unknown/The World We Live In/Joy Ride/Bling (Confession of a King)/Shadowplay/Smile Like You Mean It/Spaceman/Change Your Mind/A Dustland Fairytale/Sam’s Town/Read My Mind/Mr. Brightside/All These Things I’ve Done
Encore: Bones/Jenny Was a Friend of Mine/When You Were Young
Posted by Sean on May 10, 2009 8:09 AM
