The Killers – Somebody Told Me (Lizard King)

In their latest release, The Killers’ lead singer Brandon Flowers's lyrics explore his guitarist Keuning's problematic psuedo-Cure image through the idea that musically cross-gendered performers do not represent deviance, but rather a "gendered decency"; hence the guarded lyric “You had a boyfriend / Who looks like a girlfriend” (a lyric which according to some reports will be in next Christmas’ Queen’s Speech). Flowers - who is believed to spend hours in the mastering studio after the rest of the band making sure that a song sounds equally as good as both a polyphonic and a mono ringtone – is entirely unafraid to employ a new paradigm involving the sentimentality and hypergendered performance of eighties expressionism (which could, of course, be extended all the way back to Arabesque dancing traditions).

Unfortunately, readers unfamiliar with the gender-bending tradition in the mid-eighties’ puff-synth scene may be a bit lost here, since Flowers does not immediately describe Keuning's very "masculine" hair juxtaposed to his very "female" eyes; rather, we feel Keuning's own defence of his stage apparel through riffage and octave, consequently introducing various unanswerable questions about the nature of masculinity.

Philosophical insight aside, Somebody Told Me is a Ramones fuelled, Joy Division winged, Duran Duran aerodynamically-shaped Learjet of lament, pain and regret landing at a airport named Rock Stardom (RKSDM on your baggage tag). Through assimilation and recollection, the song characterizes contemporary society as an immense accumulation of spectacles in which everything that is directly lived moves away into a representation as telling as Flowers’ mock-English accent, which he recently attributed to accent-adoption as a result of being surrounded by Brits during a three month stint working at Las Vegas’ Gold Coast Hotel. A work ethic as well as an ear for a tune suggests a truly frightening prospect.