Out of This World

I might as well just call this blog What Would Sasha Fierce Do? because everything I seem to write comes back to her.

Sasha Fierce has been out-fierced twice in the past week. First by Lady Gaga's crack cocaine outfit (and her latest fashion choice, the plastic boob shield), and now by the Killers' frontman Brandon Flowers, whose Power Rangers: Bird Flu outfit in the new video for Spaceman put all the single ladies to shame.



Sasha needs to a release a new video for something (I recommend "Radio"), because right now, the only things she has going for are the fact that Obama's youngest daughter is named Sasha, and perhaps this video right here. Sasha Fierce would give her left leg to be a member of the Obama family, although I don't know if the world could handle the creation of Sasha Fierce Obama. That'd be like nuclear fusion technology -- dangerously high temperatures, unstable ingredients, increased entropy, and only about four pounds of hot helium air as a waste product.

I'm going to try really hard to stop talking about Sasha Fierce right now by showing some blog love to Flowers and his guy-liner-fancying crew. It takes some serious guts to do Bowie-inspired cinema when most of the people listening to you won't get the Bowie reference until after a pretentious hipster goes, "That's so Bowie," and the rest suddenly see the connection like they knew it all along. Anyways, the Killers need to feel important every once in awhile, because, even though the second season of The O.C. would never be the same without "Smile Like You Mean It," they get a lot of undeserved criticism. Their first album, 2005's Hot Fuss, struck many critics' and listeners' fancies but got flack for being perhaps too inspired by various 80s bands. Sam's Town, the quartet's 2007 sophomore effort, faced even harsher criticism with Rolling Stone's two-star rating and inevitable comparisons to that Bruce Springsteen song "Born to Run." Although nobody seems to mind that Sasha Fierce's "Diva" is basically the exact same song as Lil' Wayne's "A Milli." Damn it! I talked about Sasha again. I should just start a money jar and put a dollar in every time I talk about her.

So as I was saying, even though the Killers haven't reinvented the wheel as they kept the tradition of their favorite 80s bands alive, they've always had some solid songs, and more and more people have been coming out of the Killers closet since Vampire Weekend openly expressed their love for the anthemic songs of Sam's Town. There are plenty of moments on Day & Age where a song's potential is aurally apparent, like the second verse of first single "Human," the blinky chorus on "Losing Touch," and even those stuttering synthesizers on "Spaceman."

The band's sound was a little more all-over-the-map on Day & Age, though. Flowers told Rolling Stone that Day & Age was like looking at Sam's Town from outer space, and while songs like "Human" sonically could be in a space-age dance party alongside a Madonna remix album (actually, Stuart Price, who produced the album, also did most of the work on Madge's Confessions on A Dancefloor disc), tracks like "Joy Ride" and the stripped-down (relative to the Killers, at least) "I Can't Stay" bring the band right back down to earth back to the sleazy Vegas Hawaiian-shirt hotel cocktail lounge from which they came.

I'm going to continue to hide out in that sleazy cocktail lounge with Brandon and company because it's the only place I'm safe from Sasha Fierce. She would just poof right out of her boots from all the sub-fabulous people in her presence. They'd use up her oxygen.