Phoenix - Pop culture

On the road that runs from Versailles to Paris there are these tunnels from the 70s that are very rhythmic, because the road and the lights have a rhythm. We used to listen to Steve Reich in the car and we wanted to recreate that experience. And so we really started using the same instrumental patterns, which was a real nightmare, because it's really difficult.

(Thomas Mars)

Naiveté, dissembled elegance and a strong sense of the exotic make up the sense of estrangement that connected Phoenix, four kids from Versailles, to a world undergoing profound change. It's no coincidence that their first single, "Too Young", featured on the soundtrack of "Lost In Translation". In a scene - French pop - where singing in the mother tongue is practically a prerequisite, Thomas Mars nibbles at his English as if trying to mimic the sounds coming out of a cassette player. "Tonight, let me handle this affair...": who hasn't dreamed of whispering that into a microphone?

The world, on the threshold of a new millennium now fully within reach, appears confused and complicated, with the distances between people growing sharper even as identities melt into a single milky mass. The response is no longer the anger and contrition of the 90s, but the alienated poetry of Phoenix, an out-of-body vacation on a virtual beach.

The air of Versailles

This is precisely the feeling that permeates the band's debut, United. Holed up for four years in a garage in the distant Parisian suburbs, the four members of Phoenix perfected a sound before they perfected a musical identity.

What we like about dance music is that sound is very important, that production is an instrument, that the way sound moves the air matters a great deal - the fact that it has to make people dance makes this aspect of music crucial. The way the kick drum sounds, for instance: if it's weak, it doesn't work, because people won't feel like dancing.

The pursuit of sonic perfection would be, for better or worse, one of the focal points of the French band's career, and United is its first proof. A genuine pop cauldron of revivalist bric-a-brac, an overpriced vintage shop. Yet somehow it all works, magically: United seems to narrate the metamorphosis from a dying Nineties garage band (the parodic tribute of "Party Time") into one of the most important pop acts of the 2000s, one of the few capable of bridging indie and mainstream in a music world increasingly hungry for universality. The power of a major chord telling a sad story: that's the banal yet deeply complicated secret of "Too Young".

On a record of kaleidoscopic, Rundgren-esque pop (the psychedelic country-pop of the first half of "Funky Squaredance"), Phoenix hold their course with a light spirit, steeped in a placid, wise, Murdoch-like melancholy ("Summer Days"), guiding indie-pop by the hand into the world of lounge-pop, funk and disco. Aside from the leather-jacket-and-smoking-motorbikes single "If I Ever Feel Better", with its radio-friendly drive, and the amusingly loose, stretched-out coda of "Funky Squaredance", United is a guitar-pop record with nothing to fear.

The veiled, sweetly harmonic crooning of "Honeymoon", the orchestral pop (complete with saxophone) of "Embuscade" - and doesn't "On Fire" sound like Murdoch in a sequined jumpsuit?

Produced by Philippe Zdar, one half of Cassius, and taken on the road in England as support for Air, United also tells the story of a French scene on the rise: guitarist Laurent Brancowitz, brother of Chris Mazzalai, who accounts for the band's Italian roots, used to play with a couple of guys named Thomas Bangalter and Guy-Manuel de Homem-Christo, who would go on to become Daft Punk.

Given the success of the still-incomplete, unripe United, the next step seems fairly predictable.

"Alphabetical" was very sterile. We built this room that sounded dead, so we'd end up with a dead-sounding record - people would have to play it really loud to make it breathe.

That's not to say Alphabetical is a bad record; it simply falls into the trap of creating a work that's blandly elegant, that "sounds good" perhaps, but lacks heart, lacking that slightly naive aspiration toward musical creation that made United so vibrant.

What emerges is, beyond an unprecedented mainstream success (who wouldn't recognize “Everything Is Everything” or “Run Run Run”?), a soft-rock record, impeccably lounge. The seductive close of the title track draws the curtain on a collection of crowd-pleasing tracks, from the saccharine serenade of “Love For Granted”, where Mars draws on his entire repertoire of clichés, to the recurring funk arrangements of “Holdin’ On Together”.

Alphabetical sounds like a smoothed-out, cynically calculated copy of Phoenix: “Run Run Run” unfolds with mathematical rigor, its minimalist groove (a beat, an acoustic arpeggio, Thomas Mars's vaguely bored vocal) wrapped in a contrived sensuality. And what to make of the decadent winks of “Everything Is Everything”?

Back to the Future

Just as a path paved with success (and with living death) seemed laid out for Phoenix, Thomas Mars and his bandmates find the unexpected courage to completely change style (and their life as a band), bursting free of the personas they had built for themselves.

They spend the summer of 2005 in a studio they'd never seen before, far from Versailles and the environment that kept them under close watch.

Yes, we liked the sense of exile. I remember we had this big book about the Rolling Stones making “Exile On Main St.” in a chateau in the south of France, and just looking at the photos made us dream of an experience like that, where you leave your hometown, go somewhere that's a bit abandoned, and make it your own.

It helped us make the record faster, because being abroad gave everyone a sense of why they were there.

And It’s Never Been Like That represents a genuine leap by the band into a de-roboticized world, made of tangible feelings, things you can grab like the neck of a guitar. A guitar-pop record indebted to the Strokes (it would be described as “the meeting point between 'Last Nite' and Tom Petty”) that marries a new, instinctive and vital attitude with the band's sonic and aesthetic perfectionism.

The album's manifesto is undoubtedly “Consolation Prizes”, where the muted acoustic strum that's by now the band's trademark becomes playful and organic, and Thomas Mars finally allows himself a genuinely amused delivery, complete with ad-libs and “uh!”s. It’s Never Been Like That brings back the indie-pop innocence of United, reconsidered in light of the popstar experience gained on Alphabetical, resolving here into a far more defined expressive cohesion. In short, a record of great melodies, brought into relief by a production that amplifies the album's most thrilling passages with a bursting “wall of sound” effect (cymbal showers, shimmering rivulets and guitar rumbles).

The lavish seventies revivalism also returns, something Phoenix simultaneously sidestep, as on the emotional ridgelines of “Long Distance Call” and the album's more numerous uptempo tracks, like the pyrotechnic “Second To None”. Thomas Mars is no longer in control the way he was on the carefully constructed choruses of Alphabetical: he struggles to keep pace, clambering breathlessly up the reckless peaks of It’s Never Been Like That's songs, but ultimately emerges at the summit breathless with joy.

And it's this joy pervading the record that conveys the sense of the gift Phoenix give themselves and their listeners with this album — certainly less fortunate than its predecessor, but at the same time a promise never to turn back.

The wealth the band accumulated from the leap taken on It’s Never Been Like That pays off with a follow-up that may stand as the high point of Phoenix's career. For Wolfgang Amadeus Phoenix, the French band chooses to return to its origins: not just to Versailles, but also back into the hands of Philippe Zdar.

Buoyed by a rediscovered expressive independence and a stronger identity, Thomas Mars's band crafts a genuine pop tsunami of overwhelming tracks, a river, bubbling and glittering, of hits impossible to avoid. On Wolfgang Amadeus Phoenix, the Phoenix sound undergoes a further evolution. It's a work that displays a sonic cohesion impossible to ignore: an insistent rhythm section, often pushed to the fore, drenched in guitar showers and tides of rare clarity, lit up by pink, blue, red and black synth motifs. A sound wave capable of filling and intoxicating, surprising with sudden shifts in mood (“Love Like A Sunset”) and tone (“Countdown (Sick For The Big Sun)”).

The opening one-two delivers the most “worked-on” tracks: truth be told, outright steamrollers. “Lisztomania” is a rollercoaster: the initial suspension, unsettled by enveloping drum rolls, staring into the abyss while everything (except Thomas Mars and a toy piano) grinds to a halt… Then the energetic, liberating descent of the chorus, and then it all starts over until the band runs out of breath. Textbook construction. Things pick back up with the uptempo “1901”, another verse in this bible of catchiness that Phoenix seem intent on compiling. Bursts of keyboard, a soaring chorus that throws itself back into a storm of reverb: another summer anthem (and not only for summer). The fusion of pop songwriting and club culture that was Phoenix's stated mission here seems to come true, and “1901” is its cornerstone. The synth chords seem to explode, boldly replacing the understatement of the acoustic guitar used up to that point — the track feels like a colorful jet of indistinguishable instruments, destined to shatter and splatter the lives of those listening.

An opening one-two that nonetheless doesn't exhaust the momentum of Wolfgang Amadeus Phoenix: even when the harmless, the inoffensive peek through, the specter of filler is thoroughly exorcised. Perhaps settling for less original or less refined alternative pop-rock solutions (“Lasso”), or for more or less tried-and-tested trademarks (“Fences”), but never failing to ensnare the listener. Indeed, if the former focuses on an easy but surefire hook, the latter offers moments of unexpected musical depth in its acoustic guitar coda.

Certainly the Phoenix record most beloved by fans (who up until that point had been split between one or the other of the band's incarnations, here all summed up and surpassed), Wolfgang Amadeus Phoenix remains a hit with both audiences and critics. "1901" gets played during a Superbowl break; the band's appearances on major American TV showcases become too numerous to count. After a triumphant tour, they'll even pick up the Grammy for "Best Alternative Act".

But success can also go to your head. You could boil down the assessment of the next Phoenix album to that very banal observation: this is a band clearly overwhelmed by the expectations that Wolfgang Amadeus Phoenix had built up around them. The umpteenth, hotly anticipated "evolution" of the Versailles group instead ends up smothering (quite literally) fragile, barely-there songs under deafening sweeps of synths and effects, treating melody as "a thing of the past" ("Oblique City") and wrapping it all in a postmodern (and simultaneously retro) reflection on alienation in plastic America ("Trying To Be Cool")...

Gone, in short, is the sublime balance between guitar composition and synthetic post-processing that made "Wolfgang" modern yet substantial. On certain tracks you get the impression that Thomas Mars spent a month hunting for the right sound on his keyboard, but only a few hours writing the actual song (the terrible, unbearable dynamics of "Don't").

The illusion in Bankrupt! — or, if you prefer, the cunning trick — is believing that to tap into the zeitgeist of the indie-pop crowd it's enough to graft a few catchy sounds (part revivalist, part unheard-of) onto secondhand material (how many of these tracks sound like leftovers from "Wolfgang"...). So we get one synthetic "sunset" after another, just like the previous record, mixed in with disjointed bursts of synth, while Mars' voice struggles to find any sense of purpose. And unfortunately, the lead single "Entertainment", with its globalized theme and more conventional shape, only confirms this impression rather than dispelling it.

In 2017, after four years of silence, Ti Amo was released.

The music of Phoenix has always been as pure and delightful as fior di latte ice cream. Perhaps it became even more so with the shift from "It's Never Been Like That" to "Wolfgang Amadeus Phoenix", when guitars ceded the stage to synthesizers. And it's nothing new for the French band to weave in elements from other cultures and unfamiliar contexts either. They did it with the Orient on "Bankrupt!", with classical music on the aforementioned "Wolfgang Amadeus Phoenix", and now they're doing it with Italy. Strip away the content, though, and the result remains unchanged. Phoenix's music has always sounded the same, whether it was quoting Mozart and Liszt or showing samurai in the lead single's video.

"Ti Amo", true to expectations, has nothing Italian about it whatsoever. It's the new Phoenix album that sounds like every other recent Phoenix album, except this time it namedrops Battiato, Lucio (Dalla or Battisti, who cares which), Sanremo and ice cream. Only through superhuman restraint did they avoid throwing in pizza, mandolins and the mafia. "Hey baby, let me show you how to win my Sanremo Festival", Mars sings on the second track. And that's how the tribute Phoenix are capable of paying to Italy is born and dies in one breath. They even try singing a few words in the language of Dante, and their good fortune — they're well aware of it — is that if an Italian tries to sing a song in broken or trite English, he comes off as inept; but if a foreigner strings together a couple of phrases in shoddy Italian (because writing a whole song would really be too demanding a commitment, and far too sincere a tribute), he comes off as cool. Not only that, he even risks having Italians — used to lingering on the margins of the international music scene — thank him for it, bowing with a pinch of flattery thrown in. "Non posso vivere. Troppo bisogno di te" is the aching message that flies from one phone to another, from who knows where all the way to Hollywood, on the closing track "Telefono".

Amid this jumble of clichés there's even room for "spocchiosità" (smugness) — a word far too Italian for Mars to ever grasp. Listening to "Ti Amo", in fact, it's hard to relate to or feel even a trace of empathy for someone singing about missing his wife — an award-winning director and the daughter of Francis Ford Coppola — about speedboat jaunts and shopping among the glittering storefronts of Via Veneto. It was a thousand times better when Rome was talked about in subtler terms, comparing the state of its ruins to that of a love affair slowly decaying ("Rome" from "Wolfgang Amadeus Phoenix", 2009).

Phoenix have always been shamelessly flirtatious, and that's precisely where part of their strength has lain. The problem is that, aside from the attitude, in recent years — beyond the shift in direction already mentioned — the way the Versailles band winks at its audience hasn't changed all that much: Strokes-esque guitars layered with synth phrasing, sketching out danceable, catchy, instantly singable rhythms and melodies; lysergic, instrumental (or near-instrumental) digressions that add more varied shades, lending the album a light touch of complexity. They did it on "Wolfgang Amadeus Phoenix", with the studio version of "Lisztomania" or, more decisively, with "Love Like Sunset"; they did it on "Bankrupt!", with the title track; they do it now, in the tail end of "Fior Di Latte" or in the hazy "Via Veneto", which takes on an almost chillwave quality. Truth be told, "Ti Amo" lacks that purely instrumental track Phoenix are so fond of, which actually works in the album's favor, making it even lighter and more fluid than its already brief runtime (just over half an hour) would suggest.

"Ti Amo", in short, confirms yet again who Phoenix really are: supremely skilled architects of dance-pop hits (and there are some on this latest effort too: the lovely "J-Boy" and the sweet/erotic "Fior Di Latte" above all) who don't know how — and maybe don't even want — to push any further. They write "Ti amo" on walls, they get it tattooed on their skin, but when they talk about Italy they have no interest in immersing themselves in its native culture and music, nor in finding a place that might say something about its people; they don't cross-check local guides, they don't ask the people who actually live there for suggestions. They're like students dashing off an essay, barely skimming the topic just to say they did it. All you need to do is sit down at the restaurant facing the Colosseum and order some pasta all'Alfredo, then kiss your greasy fingertips and exclaim: "belisssimo". Nothing wrong with that, except that I'd rather not take a seat at that particular restaurant's table.

Autumn 2022. After completing a kind of world tour, passing through the old Mitteleuropa of "Wolfgang Amadeus Phoenix", the Eastern mirages of "Bankrupt!" and the Italian buen retiro of "Ti Amo", Phoenix brought it all back home with the album Alpha Zulu. A choice, let's be honest, also somewhat forced by circumstance — namely the lockdown that shut the world indoors until further notice. "Forced" to stay put in Paris (lucky them), the four of them nonetheless got a rather remarkable opportunity: to record the new album inside the Musée des Arts Décoratifs, a stone's throw from the Louvre. "There was so much beauty around us in those empty rooms," Christian Mazzalai recalled, "that we couldn't stop making music. In the first ten days we wrote basically the whole album."

More than — once again — with Italy, the Botticelli-esque cover (a detail from the "Madonna and Child with Eight Angels", painted in 1478 and actually housed in another European capital, Berlin) instead cements a bond with Art, which serves both as frame and source of inspiration for the French band. Amid one epiphany and another, you also start to suspect that, perhaps purely on an unconscious level, Phoenix wanted to pay tribute to — or let themselves be spiritually guided by — their friend and mentor Philippe Zdar, who died in tragic circumstances in 2019, giving birth to what is without doubt their most "danceable" work. Gone are the offbeat rhythms of "Wolfgang Amadeus"; instead there's a small constellation of four-on-the-floor uptempo tracks that here and there ("All Eyes On Me", the irresistible "Alpha Zulu") have the flavor of French techno, the cultural soil from which the four musicians from Versailles first sprouted.

A new variation that pushes even further the synthpop the transalpine outfit has by now become an authoritative spokesperson for, as the singles released well in advance already suggested: whether it's "Identical" (released all the way back in 2020), hieratic in its synthetic essence, or "Winter Solstice", a frosty loop that shuns traditional song structure, versus a "Tonight" with warmer, more colorful feeling thanks to the never-trite contribution of a guest of the caliber of Ezra Koenig. There's still a portion of the tracklist where Phoenix simply do what Phoenix do best — and it's the most enjoyable part. "Artefact", a bittersweet midtempo number that seems to have stepped straight out of the "Ti Amo" sessions, is one of those masterclass numbers the band has kept churning out, never growing tiresome, since the golden days of "United". No complaints either about "My Elixir", which lowers the tone even further without diminishing one bit the magic conjured by Thomas Mars' unmistakable voice. "I want to be forever young", he sings on "The Only One": more than a wish, by now it sounds like an established fact.

Contributions by Federico Piccioni ("Ti Amo"), Fabio Guastalla ("Alpha Zulu")