Natural born Killers

ALONE in the darkness behind the outdoor stage, Brandon Flowers jumped up and down and waved his arms like a boxer preparing for a fight, and wailed “hey-yay-hey!” over and over at the top of his voice like a street-corner crazy.

In a few minutes the singer would join the other three members of the Killers for the parking-lot performance on “Jimmy Kimmel Live,” part of an intensive campaign launching the band’s second album, “Sam’s Town.” But first Flowers was enjoying his moment in the shadows, a spindly harlequin with a sheepish smile for anyone he caught watching his ritual.

Just his standard pre-show warmup?

“I don’t know what I’m doing,” he said with a laugh as he jogged toward the stairs of the stage.

Flowers might have been joking, but that’s exactly what a lot of people are thinking about the Killers as the Las Vegas-based band returns with the follow-up to its rags-to-riches debut, “Hot Fuss.” Second-album time is a crucial career juncture for any pop act, and the Killers have used the occasion to unveil a radical redefinition.

Instead of the obvious -- another helping of steamy, noirish scenarios set to thumping, catchy, faux-British synth-rock, such as “Somebody Told Me” and “Mr. Brightside” -- “Sam’s Town” is filled with guitar-based anthems that aspire to something more substantial, rooted and American.

It still has the Killers’ flair for hooks, but its grand, sweeping scale proclaims that the Killers want to be a band that matters, one with a fist-in-the-air connection with its audience.

“There’s that feeling you get when you’re in a stadium and U2 plays ‘One,’ what that means to everyone there,” Flowers, 25, said during an interview the following evening.

“And it doesn’t have to be to that many people. You go from U2 size where they sell 35,000 every night to where Morrissey always sells 2,000 a night, but when you’re there, there are moments that are just -- people say it’s a substitute for religion for some people. We’re believers.”

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An American band

FLOWERS, a passionate music fan and a competitive, ambitious player, knows that nothing is guaranteed in rock these days. Take Franz Ferdinand, which arrived just before the Killers. The Scottish band seemed to have the world at its feet, but its second album faded quickly despite its excellence. So why not follow your instincts and hope for the best?

If nothing else, “Sam’s Town” fulfills two of Flowers’ primary aims.

“For me, the things that were deliberate were to sing like an American, because I’m an American, and to sing about what I know about instead of fantasies,” he said, sitting with bassist Mark Stoermer in a dressing room at the Hollywood studio where Kimmel’s ABC show is shot.

“Fantasies are OK too, but I just felt like I wanted to make an album that people could relate to right now,” he said. “I guess the American thing came from people who were talking about how English we sounded, and me actually singing with a fake accent.... Americans are getting a bad rap right now, and we felt that everywhere that we went, whether it was Germany or France or wherever, there’s a look that you get when they hear you open your mouth....

“It’s because of the war and everything that’s going on. It’s understandable, but to an extent it’s not fair because we’re just people that were born here, and we’re not ashamed of it, and I wanted to sing about growing up here and things that I know about and humanize us in a way,” he said. “People don’t see that, they see us like monsters.”

The Killers’ new sound (and the hirsute look that goes with it) might open new horizons for the band, but it’s also brought it its first critical pounding. Even though the balance of the reviews has been positive, three high-profile outlets -- Rolling Stone, Entertainment Weekly and the New York Times -- lit into the Killers, calling the band calculated and cliched, more Bon Jovi than U2.

“The funny thing about the negative press is that it’s never about the record, it’s always about the way the band looks or something that Brandon said,” said Rob Stevenson, the A&R; executive at Island Def Jam Music Group who signed the band. “I think it’s really transparent.... I think it hurt them a lot, because those negative reviews were really personal.”

“Everybody doesn’t have to like it,” said the tall, laconic Stoermer. “But it seems like we’re on the verge of being one of those bigger bands, and some writers maybe want to be the gatekeeper and want to maybe help hold you back.”

“Some indie kid on a blog, we expect that,” added Flowers. “But those are ones that we expected to be smarter. Like Mark was saying, they’re so used to people not being good that they don’t want to believe it. They just want to believe it’s a rip-off.

“And it’s not.... You can’t find a moment on this record that’s stolen from anything. I mean, this is real music that we’re writing; I think it’s been so long that they’re not used to it. Everybody just waits for U2 to make another album to go see a stadium show or to have something be exciting and big and smart.”

Now that’s sounding more like the Brandon Flowers who’s stirred things up over the last couple of years, sparking verbal feuds with other bands and freely expressing his profound confidence in his own.

“I always joke with them that they have no filter,” said Stevenson, in town from New York to ease the band through the busy week of the album’s release. “It’s very honest. I think a lot of artists have an onstage persona and an offstage persona. These guys, it’s the same thing.... It reminds me of [Oasis’] Gallagher brothers, who were always heroes of mine. Some people hate them, but I love them for their honesty and their cockiness.”

Still, Flowers was relatively low-key as he sat with Stoermer and talked about the new album, perhaps pacing himself for what the band hopes will be a marathon campaign.

It’s already getting busy. They were doing three straight nights on their friend Kimmel’s show, and after their five-song performance the night before, they’d gone across the street to sign autographs at the new Virgin Megastore. Then they rehearsed until 3 in the morning, fine-tuning their production for the world tour that opened last weekend with two concerts at the Wiltern LG.

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Aiming big

IT hasn’t taken the Killers very long to reach this point. The group started in 2002 when Flowers, a fan of David Bowie, Depeche Mode, the Cure, Oasis and Morrissey, among others, teamed with guitarist David Keuning. Stoermer and drummer Ronnie Vannucci completed the lineup after some other players came and went, and they got their record deal shortly after Stevenson heard their demo recording.

The Killers learned something about the demands and rewards of success when “Hot Fuss” arrived with no fanfare in June 2004 and quickly seemed to take over rock and then pop radio, fueled by Flowers’ brashness and rock-star stance. Its U.S. sales are up to 3 million.

How long they’ll be on the road now depends on the success of “Sam’s Town.” The album sold an encouraging 315,000 copies in its first week, but it’s the long haul that will tell the story.

“There’s lots of things that sell 10 million records two years ago and then they’re gone and no one cares about,” said Stoermer, 29. “We want as many people to like us as possible, but there’s something about a longevity to the songs, that they could be played 10 years from now, that’s what were trying to achieve.”

That is something Flowers aimed for by writing more concrete, grounded lyrics that focus on a recurring theme.

“A lot of the album is about things that are dying -- values,” said the singer, who grew up the youngest of two boys and four girls in a Mormon family in Henderson, Nev., outside of Las Vegas. “The way that I was raised, it seems like kids aren’t getting raised like that anymore.

“Sometimes it feels like we are trying to hold on to those values on the album, and then there are other times when it sounds like we’re kind of sending them off in style, kissing them goodbye.”

Flowers, who’s been married for a year, isn’t just a nominal Mormon.

“I’m not rigorous, but I’m not moderate either. I’m medium well,” he said, laughing. “I think it gives it a push and a pull.... It keeps my life interesting I guess.... You’re almost expected to be a certain way if you’re in a rock ‘n’ roll band. And it’s tempting sometimes. You know, you read stories, mythical almost stories of Led Zeppelin, David Bowie, Depeche Mode and everybody, and it sounds like so much fun.

“So that’s there, you know, just the things around us that we can’t control -- I guess we could control it a little more, but we want to have a little fun too.”

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richard.cromelin@latimes.com