Phoenix - Bankrupt!
They’re doing what M83, The Raveonettes and other bands have already been doing for a decade and those bands do it better than Phoenix.
In high-school, I befriended a French exchange student. My other friends didn’t particularly take to him because he was incredibly naïve and quick to laugh at the most benign occurrences. I forced him on my social circle because, quite frankly, he reminded me of my grandmother. A foreigner in a strange place trying his best to get by with his sensibilities under constant assault. That said, I agreed with my friends. The guy not only laughed about a mate of mine falling on his ass after being hit in the face with a soccer ball, he laughed about it for 15 minutes. He turned it into an awkward and bizarre Buster Keaton routine, recreating the fall with flamboyant exaggeration. And without a hint of malice or ill-spirit. That’s just what he was into. Fast-forward a few months and some of his friends from Paris flew over to visit him. He invited me to hang out with them at their hotel room. Watching him – let’s just call him Pierre – command the attention of his friends, driving them to maniacal laughter with every nasally syllable, outdrinking them and beating them in arm-wrestles: Pierre was the fucking man.
Phoenix are like that. Removed from their warm little nest and they seem naïve, even saccharine, expending equal energy doing their own thing and trying to fit in. They need to be appreciated in the proper context, then it all makes sense. As it happens, the context was consciously obliterated with the release of 2009′s Wolfgang Amadeus Phoenix and the ineffable force-field between Phoenix and the mainstream world was part of the collateral damage. Phoenix were showing everyone that they were the shit, what they and their comfortable niche of fans had known for a while.
And I guess being the shit is a tiring and disheartening occupation, if the despondent self-reflective lyrics of Bankrupt! are any indication of what the last three years have been like for Phoenix. They’re weary from being a pop band that suddenly became popular: “What I once refused to be / Is everything they long together / I’d rather be alone,” sings Mars on lead single Entertainment. Who knew they were that popular?
“Cool / I’m just trying to be cool / It’s all because of you,” Mars ironically serenades show business as it looks down from its second-story bedroom window, giggling coyly. The track, “Trying To Be Cool”, is one of the scattered highlights of the album. The band has never been shy of synths but on Bankrupt! they become a crutch instead of a pleasant sonic element. The familiar textures – sparkling, soaring, gauzy, heavy, fuzzy – are overwrought and insulate the band from the cock-eyed shimmer they once displayed.
With Phoenix, every track is always a little too polished, the band is a little too slick. Mars’ heartbreak always seems like it played out exactly the way he wanted it to. His neurosis and awkwardness, a performance he deftly executes like a juggling trick. The guy has the blueprint to himself and that is, besides being a troubling prospect, the downfall of Bankrupt! Phoenix have rote knowledge of what they do. It’s ingrained in the very fabric of the band and it tethers their music to the same familiar nucleus. They’re yearning to experiment when they simply meander, they attempt melody when they should go for hooks. Musically they’re doing what M83, The Raveonettes and other bands have already been doing for a decade and those bands do it better than Phoenix.
“Bankrupt!” is analogous to Wolfgang’s “Love Like a Sunset”, “Drakkar Noir” harks back to “Too Young”, “Oblique City”, a little too similar to “1901″. They’re not rehashes, they’re uncanny acts of reflexivity. Phoenix is illustrating what it’s like for Phoenix to be Phoenix and unfortunately, the image depicted is not a work of art.
“It’s very experimental, it’s very minimal music,” said Mars of Bankrupt! I’ve always found both “experimental” and “minimal” to be highly dubious terms in any context. To classify something as being “experimental” is not only vague and pretentious, it’s also hubristic. Much like “progressive,” labelling a work as “experimental” should warrant a lot more than simply slinging shit at the proverbial wall. But to call the French pretentious, vague and hubristic is about as worthwhile as saying there are too many reality shows on television: everybody already knows and they don’t like it anymore than you do, so hey, what are you gonna do? “There’s something a little frustrating when you do pop music,” Mars continued. A little frustrating? You should try listening to it some time, it’ll make your baguette limp.
(V2 / Glassnote)