Thrasher      Artist: Brandon FlowersLabel: Island RecordsBrandon Flowers was once a teenager obsessed with New Order and The Smiths. Now he’s a 45-year-old dad embracing his inner Garth Brooks with Thrasher, his country-rock solo album.That’s quite a journey for a singer whose contributions to civilisation include forever altering the DNA of the Irish wedding afters by unleashing Mr Brightside upon humanity. But (in addition to having the most perfect teeth in popular music) Flowers is a heartfelt slogger, and he goes all in on this love letter to the country rock he grew up on in rural Utah.Never one to do anything by halves, Flowers demonstrates the earnest zeal that has been a feature of The Killers’ music from the outset, whether they were giving postpunk a Las Vegas makeover on Hot Fuss, their debut LP, from 2004, or going full Springsteen, as they did on their best album, Sam’s Town, which followed two years later. Whatever the mode, he has always been driven by superhuman powers of sincerity, and that’s once again the case on this 10-gallon affair, which is lovingly burnished with every country-rock cliche he can lay his mitts on.Coming out of his alternative-rock cage, he’s doing just fine. More than fine: he’s eagerly slamming the jukebox and paying tribute to the hits of his youth with the same earnestness that has sustained The Killers across the decades while other bands have fallen by the wayside.Good for him, but so committed is he to the performance that you really do have to be a country fan to get the most of it. He plays everything straight, with none of the accidental silliness or brilliantly awful lyrics – “I’ve got soul, but I’m not a soldier” – that were a feature of The Killers’ best work.Flowers lays his heart on his denim sleeve from the outset. He warbles about “the wonder that it is to be alive” on Thrasher’s honky-tonk opener, Does It Ever Cross Your Mind?, a track that could plausibly have slotted into a Daniel O’Donnell album from back in the day.Twanging guitars are replaced by lashings of harmonica on One of Us, where Flowers pays tribute to his late brother-in-law. He then goes all old-timey on Tiger’s Blood, a nostalgic deep-dive into his teenage years – he recalls himself as “hunched in the shoulders, with gelled-up hair” – rendered in the style of a John Denver ballad.At times he’s doing professional-level pastiche. Plans wants to be Johnny Cash so badly that you can almost hear the song cry out in pain, and the good-time groove of Angel sounds like Nathan Carter with a megabucks budget.But then surface-level charm has always been the point of Flowers’s songwriting. With The Killers the big idea is that we were hearing classic British new-wave music through the filter of an enthusiastic songwriter from Las Vegas, the capital of American superficiality. So no matter how far he leans into cliche – and sometimes he’s in danger of losing his footing and falling flat on his face – Flowers always comes up smelling of roses.None of this should work: Flowers is really just playing make-believe, trying the genre on for size, the way a tourist in Nashville might a pair of cowboy boots. But on the mariachi-horn-fuelled The Red Ground and the mournful ballad An American Dream, his belief that good intentions are what ultimately matters carries the day.Is he human or is he a chancer? On this sincere album, he’s very much the former – an indie-rock true believer who applies the same blood and sweat to his music as did the artists who meant so much to him as a kid.