![]() The Feeling's star may have waned, but if anything, soft rock and glossy continental electro-pop is hipper than ever, thanks to the burgeoning nu-Balearic scene, which fits with Phoenix's rather arch and stylised approach to music far more comfortably than the hen-night-pleasing so-bad-it's-good-isms of Guilty Pleasures. And yet, there is something weirdly of the moment about Wolfgang Amadeus Phoenix. A two-part near-instrumental called Love Like a Sunset sounds like something that might have been used to demonstrate the crystal-clear clarity of the astonishing new Compact Disc format. Everything sounds precise and almost wilfully sterile, as if the whole thing were played by someone wearing rubber gloves. Nine years on from their debut, it's certainly not as if Phoenix have radically altered their musical approach. Under the circumstances, it seems odd to talk about Wolfgang Amadeus Phoenix as a timely release. Perhaps it had something to do with the general public's mistrust of the rarefied circles in which Phoenix appear to move: Heidi Slimane commissioned them to provide music for a Dior Homme catwalk show, while frontman Thomas Mars is director Sofia Coppola's boyfriend, which at least explains Bill Murray's improbable enthusiasm for their work. They're clearly selling records somewhere - Wolfgang Amadeus Phoenix is their fifth major label album - but in Britain at least, not even the ringing endorsement of Bill Murray's character in Lost in Translation could advance Phoenix beyond a cult following, the kind of band who release singles that sound like hits, but never actually become them. In the teeth of acclaim for Daft Punk and Air and the British music scene's belated discovery of Serge Gainsbourg's genius, here was a reminder that France was a nation whose taste in rock and pop had always been un catastrophe légendaire, where the Rubettes have sold more singles than the Rolling Stones, where a four-year-old spent 15 weeks at the top of the charts with a song called It's Tough to Be a Baby and whence came the walking affront to good taste you got stuck with for a week thanks to your school's exchange programme, with his mullet and unshakeable belief that the Scorpions were the most important band in the history of music.Įven when the pop world belatedly appeared to have come around to Phoenix's way of thinking, success proved elusive. Phoenix just appeared to have made an album that variously sounded like Peter Frampton and Oingo Boingo, a move suggesting that talk of a sudden revision in Gallic musical cool had perhaps been over-egged. When their debut album United emerged in 2000, the only other major artists displaying remotely similar musical interests were Daft Punk, with whose members Phoenix guitarist Laurent Brancowitz had once collaborated in a short-lived indie band called Darlin'.īut Daft Punk's love of 70s AM rock and slick 80s pop was refracted through dance music: the electronics lent a cool detachment, a sense of knowing distance from their source material. ![]() ![]() Before Guilty Pleasures, Scissor Sisters and the Feeling, the Versailles quartet were offering a blend of two deeply unfashionable musics: soft rock and the kind of synth-heavy pop-rock that turned up a lot on the soundtrack of 80s teen movies. Phoenix offer an object lesson in the perils of being ahead of the curve. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |