CALCULATED SPONTANEITY: On the new album, Phoenix aimed for “an urgency that has even more charm.”
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Brothers Laurent “Branco” Brancowitz and Christian Mazzalai fidget in a Left Bank café in the spring of 2004. Brancowitz and Mazzalai — half of French quartet Phoenix with bassist Deck d’Arcy and vocalist Thomas Mars — tell me of their frustrations in finding new harmonic footing for Phoenix’s then-unreleased sophomore album, Alphabetical(Astralwerks). Having debuted with a breezy, mid-tempo MOR pop style drawing copious Hall & Oates/Steely Dan comparisons, they’re finding it difficult to write a more subtly melancholic follow-up. Self-proclaimed perfectionists, Brancowitz and Mazzalai admit they’re not sure what the next step will be. They profess an intention to be more impulsive; I believe them. It’s two years later, and having just got off the phone with Mars, I look back over the three conversations I’ve now had with members of Phoenix (who are gearing up for a tour that hits T.T.’s this Monday, May 8) in as many years and realize how shrewd they’ve been about their evolution. “In old cities like Paris, things are heavy because everything is in place,” Branco said in 2004. “But Berlin, Oslo — these places feel like they are evolving in real time. That feeling is more where we’re at right now.”
Indeed, in 2005 Phoenix would come off a tour that yielded the live album Live! Thirty Days Ago and relocate in Berlin to record their third album, the self-produced It’s Never Been Like That (Astralwerks; May 23). Happy with the results of the live disc, the band entered a “factory-like” studio with no premeditated material in an attempt to capture “an urgency that has even more charm,” says Mars. The new Phoenix MO: calculated spontaneity.
“We felt with this album we could do the opposite of before,” Mars continues. “We dropped the idea that an album should be something out of time . . . a projection of perfection you wish to achieve. We felt it would be better and more honest to reflect us as we are now.”
Yet Phoenix didn’t have to leave Paris for Berlin to record more of It’s Never Been Like That live to tape. And reverb — perhaps the equivalent of “cultural weight” in pop music — is still an enemy of the band’s æsthetic, which prizes dry, dreamy synth washes, unobtrusive hooks, and a very ’80 sense of style.
Yes, there’s a bit more immediacy to the new album. The instruments are allowed to breathe more than they were on the parched Alphabetical, and there’s less in the way of excessive layering. But Phoenix haven’t done anything as shocking as, say, embracing the sinister sound of electro, France’s other major import of the moment.
The influence of playing for crowds — large crowds — can be felt in the opener, “Napoleon Says,” with its incessant guitar lines and pounding drums. The upbeat “Consolation Prizes,” with its strummed staccato acoustic guitars and handclap beats, and the unabashedly hooky “Courtesy Laughs” are just an affect or two away from anthemic. “Rally,” “One Time Too Many,” and “North” are the musical equivalent of an introspective stroll through the park. At no point does anyone wander off the path. And it rarely sounds as if anyone were breaking a sweat.
