Pressure Machine - Americana in retrospect.
When to Listen: When you want to chill
Accesability: Accessible
TLDR: A depressing love ballad to the middle American dream
The Killers are a band that have been around for quiet some time - and have enjoyed main stream success for years. Brandon Flowers (the main singer) is known historically for his upbeat - non nonsensical lyrics in songs like "Mr. Brightside" and "Human". However their most recent album "Pressure Machine" takes a turn from the land of glamor and dance music, instead focusing on telling the story of growing up in Utah.
What follows is a melancholic love note to the struggles, challenges and victories of the every-man chasing the American dream. Book ended by "
West Hills" and "The Getting By" - the entire album feels a self contained snapshot of a town plagued by hopes, dreams and small personal tragedies. And that is where the beauty of this album stands - the intimacy of personal stories of pain, struggle and hope, the things that many of us forget in our rat race of life. The contrast in the album is its lack of judgement, but it's insistence on touching painful subjects - suicide (Terrible Thing), drug dependence (Quite Town), infidelity (In the Car Outside), Domestic Abuse (Desperate Things) challenges of faith (Pressure Machine) all while showing a town full of people who are somehow content.
This conflict of hope and despair is what makes this album. The sound bites of every day people (The intro of In the Car Outside being one of the best) living their lives , helps frame why everyone keeps carrying on. It tells a story of love for each other , of community and perseverance in spite of great struggle that is illuminated in each song.
After the anthology of various stories of people living their lives the album wraps with the poignant conclusion of "Pressure Machine" and "The Getting By". Pressure machine frames everything we just heard into the simple challenges of living life - there is no grand resolve, there is just perseverance in the challenges of everyday. The years go by faster , time is slipping away. Life just carries on, and will eat you up and destroy you. Its in this humble realization that pressure machine ends and we move to the lesson of the album in "Getting By". The "Getting by" is the counter balance - its easy to get lost in the day to day - but in the end you put the next foot forward, and hold on to your hope - cause one day it will pay off.
And that is the main takeaway from this album. Life is hard, and non glamorous and full of challenges - but we move forward cause we love, we care and we have hope. In that hope, we can tolerate horrible things, with Brandon almost seeming to reflect that hope is a dangerous thing cause it blinds you.
Hope or not, in the end all we can do "put another day in, son and hold on 'til the getting's good"