Phoenix
Wolfgang Amadeus Phoenix
Ah, the number two album in a consensus based list. It's never a hotly felt personal choice, it's rarely a chance-taking piece of contemporania, and it's usually higher than other albums than it would be if a list were mathematically qualitative. As has been carved out in the past, as will get worse as age takes its toll, it usually music that has been listened to again and again, songs that will eventually lose even their most personal value. The lyrics become meaningless babbling, the sound itself loses all demand on attention, and when it fades away--like when it stops showing up on a shuffled playlist, or when the hard copy is forgotten in a family member's truck--it's gone forever. It's 2010, and Wolfgang Amadeus Phoenix--one of the brightest bursts of pop of 2009--already shows a bit of wear.
When M83 decided to create an homage to John Hughes, they did so with one hand firmly placed alongside the shoulder of nostalgia, declaring, as they did throughout, this was a loveable past, but it was still history. Phoenix, another band that's spent as much time mastering technology as any of 2009's dance-pop trend-chasers, doesn't bring that sort of nodding vision to Wolfgang Amadeus Phoenix. For these Frenchmen--and yes, it is a rule to mention their country of origin at some point--the breeze and the snap is the point, the tinge of filling the Christopher Cross void is the goal, and it's the baggy jean generation that they're going after.
Phoenix didn't defy expectations, they didn't even attempt to sidestep them. Doubling down on the experience they'd all but perfected on It's Never Been Like That, they slid through them, like some kind of Hollywood producer's ideal autistic genius--the "why" can't find purchase, it's only the "what" can be answered. It's worm-music, burrowing it's way through the ear and directly to the lungs, eagerly taking apart the early morning presents, sparkling eyes and naked curiosity abounding. It's the music that overly disclipined children might make, complete with youthful stabs at what Youtube might mislabel "arty", wrapped around goals that are refreshingly old school--can we be catchy! can we be poppy!--and its lyrics are across-the-board generic mystery poems. (Hardcore academics could use "Lasso" as some kind of lodestone for convoluted discussions of public sexuality as performative social interactions, but Phoenix probably had a more "I've got soul, but i'm not a soldier" sort of catch-phrasing in mind.) They wanted to play, so they did, and they somehow managed to capture the experience intact, pretension and goofiness together.
These sorts of albums eventually get replaced in their rotation, usually by the latest edition of whatever it is that comes along to supplant them. They're albums of immediacy, often less valuable to those who spend their time exploring the past--after all, perfect dance songs exist, only a fool would pretend that everything creative is laced with the ambition of dominance. Music, thankfully, can't ever really win. It's too much of a moving target, after all. In the short term--the year, the month, the moment--it can only end up in a position of default supremacy, those lucky moments when the right song meets up with the right time. Last year? Phoenix pulled it off more often than not. Hell even Cadillac thought so.
(Still, "to reignite the soul?" Jeeeezus.)
-Tucker Stone, 2010
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