 |
· · ·
There’s a party tonight.
No, it’s not Eurovision. I’ve written about that a few times now, and I think I’ll give this year a miss. Not because my interest has waned or because the quality is in any way lacking (I am so proud of our very own Kate Miller-Heidke and her skyscraping performace — she’s in with a chance to win the whole dang thing if you ask me, and so are those groovy folks from Switzerland) but simply because there are only so many ways to write basically a witty spreadsheet.
So this party.
Spotlights sweep through the night sky like a great celestial semaphore, inviting all to the palace.
Forests of glowing neon thrust upwards at regular intervals, glowing topiary waypoints sculpted rather than grown.
An avenue stretches for miles, straight as an arrow, never deviating an inch, waxed and buffed so perfectly that one is accompanied by one’s reflection from the very edge of the exquisitely manicured grounds all the way up the grand staircase and onto the dancefloor in the palace’s most spacious ballroom.
Wherein all the best and brightest and their inverted doubles are getting down.
In black tie, natch.
The first three albums from France’s premier indie rockers Phoenix were warmly received by a modest following, but this, their fourth, catapulted them to Grammy-winning mainstream success.
Phoenix approach songwriting from an oblique angle, one that only someone unclouded by prejudice and and unfettered by precedent could chart. Wolfgang Amadeux Phoenix is a forty-minute mistranslation: untamed variety implemented with lockstep precision, gilt in ironclad confidence. The quartet’s airtight instrumentation is memorised and internalised verb declension; the concession to canon that justifies the surrounding extravagance.
And golly is it extravagant.
Concepts and clauses splash against one another like bucketloads of bright paint, throwing off irregular impressionistic spatters secondary in colour and in order of effect. Enough to invite a double take — in particular a peculiar affinity for groupings of three where a more traditional artist would content themself with four — never even a suggestion of muddying the intent of either.
‘1901’ flicks strobing chords through pockets of empty space, skimming right past the tonic at every opportunity into weightless skies. The seesawing fifths of ‘Lisztomania’ bravely elide hook into ostinato, and both into scalloped polyrhythms. And like an indecisive sunset, ‘Armistice’ rises and falls in glorious melodrama, permitting a twilit palette to tint field, forest and sea.
Phoenix have curated a luxurious selection of glowing pinks and neon oranges lacquered over the most luscious funk this side of Versailles. The quartet thirsts to explore every niche and crevice of this incandescent landscape with the persistance of a professional cartographer and the zeal of a pop conoisseur.
What could be more French than that?