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Review by Rob.

Great gig, shame about the venue.

Civic Hall. Just the name is enough to conjure up images of councilors holding great lavish back slapping ceremonies, or annual flower shows and similar events. The over bearing image is that of a soulless place set amongst blocks of badly designed 60's concrete municipal buildings housing such bastions of functionality like police stations and magistrates courts. In fact though we possibly didn't see too much of the town, most of Wolverhampton seemed to be like this. Indeed the town boasts not one but two crappy gig venues, the other one being the Wulfrun Hall which to be fair I have never been to but I expect it to be along similar lines to the Civic. Anyway I will leave the slagging of our great nation's buildings to Prince Charles and move on. It's not everyday the Las Vegas glitz of the Killers comes to Wolverhampton (possibly the understatement of the year) and the audience were well fired up for it (well our group were anyway). This tour was really a smallish club tour - a road test for the new album Sam's Town which grows on me with every listen. It was going to be interesting to see how the new stuff goes down live.

Bang on 9.17 the band take the stage and fire straight into the opening 3 tracks of the new album. The audience goes seriously wild for recent single 'When you were young' and its obvious most people here have at least heard the new stuff and probably bought it. In the next hour or so features a pattern of a couple of new songs interspersed with choice cuts from debut album Hot Fuss, and mostly the stuff from the far superior side one at that. From the latter half of this album only 'Glamorous indie rock and roll' is played'. Early on they do 'Somebody told me' and 'Smile like you mean it' and these really take the show up several notches. To be fair they maintain the high quality control with most of the new stuff. This peaks with new single 'Bones', a song I don't care for much on the record as it verges on cheesy pop, but with the brass stripped away live it is another beast altogether and was one of my highlights. 'Jenny' takes us back to the debut again and they hit their only real glitch with 'Uncle Johnny' the polar opposite of 'Bones', great on the album, but ruined here by a shoddy lead guitar mix plus the dodgy venue acoustics resulting in the guitar led melody which normally sounds excellent being just one long muddy riff here.

Ask most of the audience what song they wanted most though and its always going to be 'Mr Brightside', which interestingly is supposed to be a follow on to album opener 'Jenny' in which the subject is jailed for killing his girlfriend, and in Brightside is released but gets into more jealousy and kills again. There is also reputed to be an unreleased tune which closes this murder trilogy. Not quite up to the heady standards of Nick Cave's Murder Ballads, but a noble effort. Anyway on with tonight and 'Mr Brightside' closes the main set and the audience nearly raise the roof (if the did they would improve the venue) with their mass sing along to absolutely every word. It has been quite a short set though the encores are great as they play possibly the best song on the new album, 'Reasons Unknown' and follow this with the quintessential Killers tune 'All these things I've done' (the crowd have been chanting the 'Soldier' refrain for a while before they play it and now indulge fully in another great sing song). They return a second time to conclude the show gently with the full version of 'Exitlude', then they take a quiet bow and leave. Throughout the show they haven't said too much to the audience preferring to let the songs to the talking and by and large it works. So overall a really good show and at the end even a rubbish venue can't spoil the party. Would have been truly great to see this show in Nottingham Rock City though. One plus to the venue however, if you stand on the right step on the other side of the road outside you can see straight through the foyer into the gig - as long as the doors are open.

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