(Photo courtesy of wearephoenix.com)Released: April 23, 2013
To say that French indie quartet Phoenix’s new album has been highly anticipated is a gross understatement. The band's first album in four years, “Bankrupt!” is cut from the same cloth as the band’s 2009 breakout, “Wolfgang Amadeus Phoenix,” which provided the basis for a career that included a headlining spot at this year’s Coachella music festival.
Phoenix can give lessons in the right way to start an album. Lead single “Entertainment” is an uptempo dance-rock track with some great oriental influence. It’s got the kind of infectious melody that will be stuck with listeners for days, exuberantly masking a darker message (“Entertainment show them what you do with me / When everyone knows better”). It’s the same self-aware mantra that every introspective artist or band fights, and Phoenix has turned it into the synth-laden indie gold that has brought the band fame in recent years.
Dreamy “S.O.S. In Bel Air” marks another highlight of the compact album. It’s a wishful mix of '80s influences and French-laden references to upper-crust indulgences. The track is part-observation and part-critique of high society in one of the most exclusive neighborhoods of southern California. Traveling seamlessly between fast-paced cries of “And you can’t cross the line / But you can’t stop trying” and slow verses, the members of Phoenix show that they’re all too aware of the valuable strengths of the band's past albums.
The songwriting prowess is even clearer on “Trying To Be Cool,” which manages to sound at once optimistic and dark. It moves from key to key, punctuating the track with discordant guitar slides and the ghostly repetition of, “Tell me that you want me / Tell me that you want it all.” The track fades away into an eerie piano that will leave listeners shaken and intrigued, ready to move forward into the album’s eponymous “Bankrupt!”
The quiet “Bankrupt!” is a musical interlude that plays like an experiment in production. There’s a bit of synthesized flute underscored by a quiet, metallic rhythm that segues into something harsher and quicker. The track is built like Queen’s “Bohemian Rhapsody,” with several clear parts that come together in a jarring suite that will throw listeners, willing or not, into a trance. It’s drug-fueled wonder in a dirty, distorted seven-minute package, and it’s fantastically creepy.
A string of three wholly unspectacular tracks (“Drakkar Noir,” “Chloroform,” “Don’t”) is broken up by the beautiful “Bourgeois.” It’s yet another social commentary that argues against the dangers of always wanting something more. Lead singer Thomas Mars sings, “Bourgeois, why would you care for more? / They give you almost everything, you believed almost anything.”
The album comes to a close with “Oblique City,” which is as perfect a track to end the record as “Entertainment” was to kick it off. The complicated layers of synths and vocals makes for an anthemic end to what was a stimulating listen.
In many ways, this new album is similar to “Wolfgang Amadeus Phoenix,” but perhaps it’s the intermittent four years between records that has allowed the band to grow and tweak its sound just ever so slightly into what is arguably an album with more collective merit.
And hey, if it’s not broken, don’t fix it. Phoenix has taken that to heart, pumping out another 10 tracks of the type of music that made “Wolfgang Amadeus Phoenix” so catchy and universally appealing. “Bankrupt!” proves that Phoenix has earned its spot atop the indie charts.
Reach the reporter at svhabib@asu.edu or follow her on Twitter @discoanddessert
