I buy a lot of music, most of which I listen to for a few months before moving on to the latest new thing, the CD consigned to an ever expanding mountain in the lounge...and the occasional best bits on the MP3 player.
But there are a few albums which achieve perennial status in the heart and mind, stuff I keep coming back to...and which keep on rewarding.
For me, one of those perennials is the Killers debut, Hot Fuss, nearly a whole album of killer (sorry) tracks. And for Christmas I got their latest, Day & Age, which again keeps funding its way back on to the CD player.
Why? It's not the (objectively) best thing I've got recently by any stretch; it's not even amongst the best reviewed (a ho hum 3 stars in Q I think).
So maybe it has something to do with a comment Bono made about them in a recent interview: "wow! There's melody for you".
The Killers don't do cutting edge, or difficult, or challenging, or (willfully) clever and creative, or sonic art (or whatever). But neither do they do the derivative pap of many wannabees who can barely scrape together one album.
They just do great, popularist tunes which (if it's your kind of thing) you can't get out of your head. And there's nothing wrong with that.
Which got me thinking about the 'melody' and 'tunes' in what we do (honestly, it did - sad I know). And whether sometimes we get too hung up on striving after the cutting edge, clever, 'creative' (pick you C) at the expense of the popularism that 'real' people actually like (but which the beard stroking, muso equivalents of the comms industry turn their noses up at - that's us).
A case of too much Radiohead maybe, and not enough Killers (or, loathed as I know they are by some, Coldplay). Personally, some of the most effective things I've worked on have been in the Killers camp, whilst Radiohead comms (creative as it may have been..or seemed) passed people by.
