The Bravery
The Bravery
(Island)
It sucks to have to agree with anything that The Killers say or do, but when singer Brandon Flowers recently attacked The Bravery, saying “They’re signed because we’re a band…I think people will see through them,” he couldn’t have been more right. The Bravery makes haircut rock. Their songs are extensions of fashion choices. Forgetting and/or eschewing artistic merit and lyrical honesty, they choose to focus instead on studded belts and vintage t-shirts. The result is an album that sounds like third-generation scraps, one that’s full of ideas stolen from bands who stole them from someone else a few months before. Essentially, the band is the Bush X of the dance-punk craze, a horseman signalling the end is near.
—Matt Charlton