The Killers

Here's a fun riddle: What do you get when you combine Talking Heads, New Order, Pet Shop Boys, Queen and the country of Jamaica? Answer: The Killers' third LP, Day & Age.

Echoes of past influences have always made it easy to evaluate the Las Vegas band's music based on what it's not; what it is, and continues to be, here, is a meshing of so many styles first created by other bands that it's hard to credit The Killers with anything uniquely their own. That said, the new album also stands as the band's strongest yet: The Killers seem to have abandoned their faux-vaquero image of 2006's Sam's Town, preferring instead a calypso-infused space rock like Caribbean hippies sitting in with David Bowie.

It all makes for an interesting conundrum: The band's musical point of view is so unclear, it might as well have sampled every note from someplace else, but the overall mishmash makes the album more thematically coherent than previous Killers efforts.