Hot Fuss

Hot garbage

hot fuss, more like hot fucking trash

When I see this pop up, the phrase “Kill me” comes to mind. HOW IS THIS ONE THE MOST IMPORTANT 1001 ALBUMS EVER WRITTEN. Ugh. Anyway. I’m coming into this one with a touch of bias. First song starts off with the nothing guitars pioneered by this nothing band. This was worrying me. I thought “is this kind of good” for a total of 15 seconds. It’s over. The vocals are horrible, the needless drama is wretched. It sounds like a manipulative millennial predator spearheading a theatre production. It’s endless to boot. One of the top 5 most insufferable songs ever to reach the mainstream. It hits my ears like poison. I’m not even surrounded by drunk screaming white people. I’m just a white people listening to this by myself. So not only am I in pain, I’m embarrassed. Fuck the Killers. Let me check Wikipedia. Fuck Brandon flowers, fuck Dave Keuning, Fuck Jeff Saltzman, Fuck Island Records. Hell, Fuck Las Vegas for producing these people. This is a repetitive, overly simple piece of garbage that somehow sounds like a car commercial AND a joke song written by a character in a mockumentary. Genuinely awful and while I hope this is the last time I’ll ever hear it, I’m sure it’ll be shoved down my throat everywhere I go for at least the next quarter century. Boring. Lame. Sappy, yet no real emotion is even being insinuated. What is the emotion? Indifference? The colour grey? You guys suck. Congratulations on bilking the public with your lab created tripe. Another BANGER here guys. WOOOOOOO. The chord progressions, the synthesizers, the melodies, the drums. All awful. And the vocals. Jesus fucking Christ. Terrible. What is this song even trying to say? Yes, let’s get black parade piano notes in this. Let’s try to sound like the Beatles if they were parodied in a motion picture that didn’t acquire the rights to their songs. I’m sorry. I really have sympathy for people. I just know this song was played at weddings throughout the 2000s/2010s. “I’ve got soul, but I’m not a soldier.” That lyric irked me when I was 10. It doesn’t make sense on the face of it and insinuating “souls” were in any way involved with the creation or distribution of this record is fraudulent. Can’t even play guitar. And then it’s buried in the mire of lame synth. What is this song? Holy hell. Poor Andy. Being addressed by this dweeb. Come on. You’re joking at the point. This is AWFUL. I’m uncomfortable. I’ve developed hives. There are rumours that they’re a Christian band. Maybe I’m possessed because this is now causing me physical harm. That whiny guitar lick. Burn in hell. You’re the worst and you can’t change my mind. Believe me Natalie. I’m at a loss. I’m going to get my closest three friends in a Room with a Casio keyboard and a sheet of bob Marley Christmas music, add some horns. 30 million listeners a month. Mr. brightside feat Sublime. Trails off into more synth bullshit. Two more songs. I genuinely haven’t had allergies this bad in months. Did he just do vocal scatting for a minute??? They bury the vocals behind effects. I wish they’d bury the vocalist. I mean not really, but I do wish with all my heart that he would stop making music. And also invent a device that erased his entire catalog from current availability and also memory. Sick guitar solo Though may I sit microscopic, adrift in an ocean of stars, though I may crane my neck heavenward in search of answers, my cries for merciful truth unheeded. Darkness descends upon me in the form of tomes written by a heathen that besiege my wellbeing and cause my ponderance to descend into pleading. I beg for the end and all the gods can reply is “It’s indie rock and roll for me.” We are nearing the merciful end. After a four minute autotuned showtune about the genre they ruined, will I ever be the same? I feel like I have been prematurely aged. This is truly one of the worst things I’ve ever heard. A swath of nothing that still grates on me to the point of exhaustion and boiling fury. If you like this, shame on you. Examine your life. Music for people who hate it. I hate the killers with a passion they couldn’t manufacture in a lab. 0 HIGHLIGHTS: Being right about this band. Also an album where every track is awful, but also gets worse as the album continues is pretty special.

even mr brightside was mid

I didn’t like this album 20 years ago, and I find it insufferable 20 years later.

God, how I hate this band. In the category of Mormon musicians operating in the general realm of "rock music", give me Low, a glaring omission in Dimery's book, and please erase this style-over-substance disgrace. "More concerned with artifice than artistry," that Pitchfork review puts it, and I heartily agree here. In other words, "smile like you mean it," just as singer Brandon Flowers puts it himself. Call that a lapse of the tongue that he chose that catchphrase for the chorus of one of the couple of listenable songs on the album (including opener "Jenny Was A Friend Of Mine", with its catchy bass hook, and maybe "Andy, You're A Star" if you can enjoy weird, moody stuff). Everything else comes off as pure pretense. It's, indeed, a fake smile. Is Flowers aware of the irony himself? Does it even matter? There were enough followers with questionable taste in music praising his band's shtick to make the latter a huge commercial success (sorry for the apparent contempt here, but as you're gonna see at the end of my review, Brendan Flowers is not faultless himself when it comes to expressing unfair contempt--so I guess it's only fair game). More power to those Killer fans, and to the band they thought was so great at the time. But less power to good music at large, might I venture to add. 🙃 Highlighting those two or three salvageable cuts up there is indeed as far as I'll go to give compliments to the songwriting and production on this thing. Between the annoying singles displayed on the first side, with so many forced inflexions on vocals and hackneyed arrangements (gosh, those laugh-out-loud, cringe synth flourishes on "Somebody Told Me"!), and the boring deeper cuts on the second side, either bland ("Change Your Mind") or overblown to ridiculous proportions ("Believe Me Natalie"), there's almost nothing to save in this record. The chord sequences are predictable and unimaginative. The vocal lines rarely favor interesting harmonies and Flowers's performance is often grating. The Killers steal aesthetics going from U2 to The Strokes, or from Interpol to Duran Duran (a-hem), and yet somehow, they manage to retain the worst, most clichéed and worn-out features from each of those iconic bands (they'll do the same with Bruce Springsteen a few years later). And the result is, mildly put, a cheesefest of truly epic proportions. In that regard, they even push the envelope for the conclusion of the album, just when you think things couldn't get worse at this point. *Hot Fuss*'s original tracklist indeed ends with the meandering, pointless synth-heavy "Everything Will Be Alright", and here the Last Vegas band actually yield to their most performative impulses rather than try to find a way out of their all-too-calculated imposture. On paper, a good rock album can end with a slow, moody, borderline-experimental cut to show the full scope of your skills. The thing is, Killers have absolutely no idea how to make that sort of composition work. And here it shows. And then there's the cream on the shitcake: "bonus track" "Glamorous Indie Rock & Roll", which sounds like a Flight Of The Conchords parody. Except that it's not. Except that there's nothing funny about it. And except that its runtime reaches the four-minute mark, and that it's three minutes and fifty five seconds too long as it is. Here's what Flowers had to say about this song supposedly mocking "hipster culture" in August 2009: "There's so much snobbery. You go through high school and all the paranoia and crap that goes with that. It's bullshit. I just didn't want to be like that. We like big songs and we're going to embrace it." In other words, *true* indie-rock musicians and their fans are insecure snobs, and the song has to be interpreted as a snarling takedown of that mindset. There's so much contempt for people that are probably just sincere about what they like on the part of Flowers here that I don't know where to start to roast him... And then, *one month later*, this is what the Killers frontman had to say about "Glamorous Indie Rock & Roll": in an interview with Rolling Stone, in September 2009, Flowers cited it as his least favorite Killers song, stating that hearing it makes him want to "crawl under a rock". Had he suddenly found out that he was actually the insecure snob here, possibly stemming from the slow realization that going after big, 'arena rock' compositions wasn't that fulfilling on an artistic viewpoint after all (even if it filled his pockets)? Or has he just simply realized how cringeworthy the whole track is? Well, as Wikipedia points it out, two years later, in a comeback show at London's Scala, The Killers played "Glamorous Indie Rock &Roll" live in London for the first time in four years, and then they played it again on the following day, in another gig in the city. Conclusion: the man has no personal integrity. Pick a lane, for chrissake. So f*ck him. And f*ck his lame band. The Wikipedia page about *Hot Fuss* remarks that it was, at one point, listed among the 1001 Albums You Must Hear Before You Die. *At one point*. Which means that someone in Dimery's team came to their senses and erased the record for subsequent editions. So I guess I shouldn't have wasted so much time writing this long review on that shitty band's account. Just hope I didn't waste yours here, and that my review was at least informative enough for you so as to make up your own mind about The Killers. No reason to make a (hot) fuss just because some people disagree with you on music, whether in high school or elsewhere. It's probably a lesson Flowers should have mulled over before making artistic choices he later bitterly regretted. As a lot of impassioned music fans know, all the money in the world can't buy true integrity and genuine artistic flair. 0.5/5 for the purposes of this list, rounded up to 1. 5.5/10 for more general purposes (5/5 for overall musical competency + 0.5/5 for the actual artistry) Number of albums left to review: 99 Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 388 Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 227 Albums from the list I certainly won't include in mine: 286 (including this one)

Didn't like it

3.43 rym non ascolterò questa merda perchè so già che è merda 1/5

I hate hate hate Mr. Brightside (I cannot stand Mr. XYZ adressations in general, but also hate this song in particular.) Sometimes when there is a song I hate I can still enjoy the rest of the album. But not this.

The only thing I knew about The Killers before listening was that time vocalist Brandon Flowers happened to be on Skavlan together with Richard Dawkins and was sort of ambushed into fiercely defending his lifelong mormon faith. Poor guy got pretty agitated. Plus I remember his stilted cover of "Got My Mind Set On You". I therefore tried hard to go into the album open minded. They've obviously got some solid hooks on some of the songs. I find the production too compressed and rather lifeless, and that filter on Flowers' vocals was ok in the beginning but started to really grate on me halfway through. The album is also extremely frontloaded, and gets progressively less interesting as it goes on. It's adequate 00s rock heavily dragged down by sterile production and lack of variety. There's just not much to it, as far as i can tell.

lyrics suuuuck

Was dreading this, but then it didn't sound as bad as I expected... Almost good, but then I thought actually, I'd rather clean the toilet than listen to this rubbish. If you could bottle the spirit that Brandon Flowers brings to his work, you could seal it tight and dispose of it responsibly.

No. 1

Ugh, pretty boy angsty adolescent whining, repetitive and unimaginative... Can't listen to this. 1 Star.

alle nummers zijn onderling inwisselbaar... ik hou ook niet van de bombastische stem... geen idee waar 'the fuss' over deze plaat vandaan kwam... 13 in een dozijn

Piss poor weak US wannabee indie shite. Why is this music still being made?

Songs I knew: Somebody Told Me (semi banger) Mr. Brightside (semi banger) All These Things That I've Done Liked: Midnight snow Didn't like: On Top (didn't like the synth - corny) Everything Will Be Alright (opening felt like a Queen song a bit) Glamorous Indie Rock & Roll (lol this is so embarassing) Literally 3/12 songs are listenable

I absolutely detest this band.

Naja.

nö

Not for me. Pretty anthemic. I thnk I've heard a lot of these songs in commercials.

Why? Undoubtedly the top boring album generated so far ..... bored ... boring, boring, bored. 1/2 stars ....

Eh ok, not really my style.

Noise.

Love the music, but can't stand the vocals. It's not even his voice. It's just the filter they put on it. Boring.

Take a 12-year old boy who just been told he can't watch Lilo and Stitch on TV until his grandparents have gone home. Record his angsty response and add a self-pitying backbeat. Sell your new Killers album to dullards.

Väldigt ointressant och alldeles för poprockigt för min smak.

Not my thing

I don't like The Killers

Generic "indie rock." There are 1001 albums they could have picked rather than this dreck.

I'm not listening to this

Sorry but did not enjoy this album

Killed it

one of the standard bearers of the dark age of mainstream music. squeaky clean and totally vacuous production, no subtlety whatsoever, any emotion feels purely artificial, and to top it off i simply just don't like Brandon flowers' voice and overblown, melodramatic delivery. i did like it in high school so revisiting it was kind of fun for that reason, but I definitely won't be listening of my own free will ever again

I really hate mr.brightside, this just isn't my jam

I FUCKING HATE THE KILLERS. Their music is whiny and annoying, and was way overplayed on the radio. No thanks.

Never listened to this before, despite the ubiquitous singles. Not very good

ummm

joo albumin alussa, vastaan tuli megahittejä populääri hullutus lauluja. kaikkia aivan sysipaskoja toki. odotellessa, albumin b-osiota... huomattavasti vähemmän kuunneltu..toivomus: albumi paranee... noh biisejä tuli ja meni, eikä yhtään parempaa ollut... halusin niin vitusti antaa kaks tähtö tuiki tuiki töhtöstä, mutta en voi puhtaalla omatunnolla tälle vitun otukselle antaa propseja. 2004 on vuosi, ei ollut kovin hyvä rock musiikille :) jenny was a friend of mine... eka b iisi ehkö paras. sombedoty told me niistä kommersiaalisesti suoriutuneista biiseistä paras

Wish I could give this tripe a 0.

Was nervous to listen to this. Did not go in with high expectations. Had to skip Mr shit song. Song no.3 pretty annoying. Song 1 best so far. Find this vocalist so punishing "smile like you mean it". I think I have Brightside PTSD. Holy shit, this album has somebody told me on it as well. Chart topper. Oh no, I hate this song as well. These lyrics are pure ass, shit myself. Organs on song 5 are interesting, oh no back to simple shit. I got soul but im not a soldier is a dumbass line. Song 5 sucks. Andy your a star isn't too terrible. On top sounds like every other song. Change your mind is very simple, not in a charming way. When is this album going to end. Thank god only 4 left. "You got a real short skirt I want to look up look up look up" - horrible. Everything will be alright is actually pretty good and moody so far, kinda like it. Atmospheric. Fav song yet. Last song is just ok. Rating: 3/10 (assuming most of these albums are influential/good).

Initial Thoughts: not happy with this one lol. I’ve only heard the ultra popular mr bright side and i despise it

Repetitive themes, overproduced vocals and simple rock beats but catchy tunes that give me a sense of nostalgia.