It’s rare that a contemporary band manages to pull off a cover of a classic that is as enjoyable as the original, but I think The Killers do something special with this song. For tomorrow, hope everyone has a fantastic day in their own way…
Friday Night Jukebox
Scott is a sometimes blogger and social media consultant/principal at East Side Media. In addition to writing at the League of Ordinary Gentlemen, Scott is also a founding member of Beams and Struts and a fellow at the Canadian Council for Democracy's blog the Commons. You can reach Scott via email and follow him on Twiter.
Tod Kelly 
Katherine 
Will Truman 
Kyle Cupp 
Burt Likko 
spivak 
Jaybird 
Pierre Corneille
{ 17 comments }
The Killers are one of the few mainstream contemporary bands I can tolerate or even kind of like. Which officially makes me a thirty year old curmudgeon. It’s not like the popular stuff from my teens and early 20s was objectively better in any fashion (actually, I hated almost everything that came out in my early 20s even more than I hate most of what comes out now, so maybe I’m getting better).
Anyhow, I definitely think they pulled the cover off, but still – the original is better. I always forget how good the Dire Straits were.
No one can beat the Dire Straits. It’s just not metaphysically possible.
I don’t know – classic Jimmy Cliff and Toots and the Maytals set a pretty high bar for me. But that’s just apples and oranges, I suppose.
Sorry, I meant that no one can play a Dire Straits song and beat the Dire Straits, metaphysically speaking. If we’re waxing greatest band of all time… I’d be torn between Dylan and the Never Ending Tour and Bruce Springsteen with the E-Street Band. But such flights of fancy are necessarily incomplete by all accounts.
Indeed.
Hahahaha y’all are some old fogeys. This thread makes me feel a lot better about turning 24.
That explains a lot Will
Thirty-two and proud of it, Will. Better to be an old man in a young man’s game than vice versa.
Their Joy Division cover was actually surprisingly good as well
The Killers really are a surprise for me. I liked Hot Fuss when it came out quite a bit, but if you’d asked me whether I thought The Killers would wind up being a prominent main stay in contemporary rock ‘n roll I probably would have scoffed. I figured they’d have a couple of follow up albums that never really nailed the success of their first and essentially fade away. But here they are and to their credit they make great music that tinkers around the edges of innovative.
I’ve got floor seats to their show here in April and so I’m re-listening to their albums to bone up for the show and re-discovering how much I appreciate their music. A great blend of disparate styles.
My vote:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WIXg9KUiy00
Scott is right, the Dire Straits cannot be topped when a Dire Straits song is being covered. This is an empirical fact. Unless, of course, it’s the Dire Straits themselves who are topping……themselves. The live version of “Romeo and Juliet” on Alchemy (Disc One) is so absurdly good that I can’t remember the last time I listened to the studio version.
Which reminds me: I was discussing with some friends the other day how the Dire Straits are considered something of a joke band by music snobs, using an example from Shaun of the Dead in which they chuck a DS LP at a zombie while saving (to my mind, at least) clearly inferior works. Why is this? What do the hipsters have against Mark Knopfler and co.?
Sonny: sincerity.
Sincerity is to hipsters as sunlight is to vampires.
Beware of Sonny Bunch’s music suggestions, Scott. I think he devoted an entire post to praising Coheed and Cambria back in the day.
Also, not all hipsters despise sincerity. One of Canada’s greatest musical exports is Stars, and that hipster-rific band is nothing if not sincere.
PS – I’m not a huge fan of the Killers, but a singles collection of their stuff would be pretty money.
Hot Fuss, a solid B+. The follow ups, solid C’s in a solid C genre, New Wave.
To be fair, I’m pretty sure Coheed was only a small part of that post, which was a longer discourse on progressive rock in general (which I enjoy immensely for the complexity of the music contained therein).
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