Enlarge image
Pop band Phoenix
Photo:
Shervin Lainez
Album of the week:
Phoenix - "Alpha Zulu"
advertisement
Phoenix
AlphaZulu
Label: Glassnote (membrane)
Label: Glassnote (membrane)
approx. €15.99
price query time
11/04/2022 3:14 p.m
No guarantee
Order from Amazon
Product reviews are purely editorial and independent.
Via the so-called affiliate links above, we usually receive a commission from the retailer when you make a purchase.
More information here
It's not clear whether Thomas Mars and his colleagues from the French band Phoenix had mashed potatoes or tomato soup with them when they were handed the keys to the Louvre.
Probably not: the four boys from Versailles, who were already making music together when they were teenagers, are considered more of aesthetes than punks.
Let's put it this way: other successful artists from France, who stand for a more aggressive pop design or who come from the Maghreb and the banlieue, would certainly not have been allowed to do it so trustingly, in the Musée des Arts Décoratif, a side wing of the Palais Royal to set up a studio.
There Phoenix recorded their seventh album »Alpha Zulu« during the closing times of the Corona lockdown.
Pop in the museum, even the
geeks
from Phoenix used to rebel against it.
»How is it that we are suddenly treated like an institution«, asks band member Laurent »Branco« Brancowitz in the accompanying letter to the album.
But then, amidst the medieval art, sculptures and modern paintings of Dalí, they discovered a deeper meaning behind the metaphorical self-museumization. "The backstage of the museum is like a mashup," says bassist Deck d'Arcy.
"It's very pop in a way - the way we make music." Okay.
Being culturally inclined, they were naturally immediately reminded of Godard's film »Bande à part«, in which Claude Brasseur, Sami Frey and Anna Karina famously bet how fast one could sprint through the venerable Parisian museum.
Like small children, Phoenix were happy to romp around alone in the museum at night - and were euphoric that they were finally allowed to play together again after months of forced separation (singer Mars lives in New York).
The result is not a dignified, saturated late work of a state-supporting gang of mid-forties as the Botticelli painting on the cover might suggest, but, surprisingly enough, the freshest Phoenix album in a long time.
The title track pushes onto the dance floor with pulsating synth grooves, »umbrella« eh-he-heys and polymorphic speech samples, as if it were a matter of knocking the dust out of your bones and your designer sweaters.
"Wooh-ha, singing Hallelujah," the refrain is reminiscent of the "Wooh-yeah" from "Too Young," Phoenix's first big hit in 2000, probably not without reason The line “I must have died at fifty one in 1953” probably refers to “1901”, another hit from the fourth album “Wolfgang Amadeus Phoenix” (2009), which is guarded like a grail in indie pop circles.
"Why choose your body over time?" Mars says, freed from the constraints of time and age.
The Mona Lisa, »immortalized, décapitée« also appears in the text.
After all, you were in the Louvre.
The energy of this track alone is impressive and continues into "Tonight," for which Phoenix invited a guest vocalist for the first time in Ezra Koenig of the equally eclectic band Vampire Weekend.
Even if guitars, if at all, play more in the background and songs like "The Only One" tie in with the Italo-Disco from the last album "Ti Amo" (2017), the return to the trending noughties sound is all too clear.
Fans of the first hour can snuggle up in nostalgia with this album, sip barista coffee and leaf through the Ikea catalog as if the world were still halfway okay.
»Season 2«, in which life is treated like the next season of a TV series, sums up this sense of habit.
Musically, it picks up on the influences of eighties talking heads,
Two songs, however, place Phoenix in a more modern time: "Winter Solstice", whose Stream-of-Consciousness lyrics about alienation and fundamental changes in the world Mars sang over a programming sent to Mars without the rest of the band in New York, maybe that is urban R&B track the band has ever recorded.
Could also be due to the renewed Rihanna reference - in any case, it's a bright shimmering diamond.
Mars almost sounds like a singer in the second notable track, "All Eyes on Me," which, on a futuristic hi-NRG beat and somber synth fidgeting, suggests that even in classic mode, Phoenix are still capable of the ghost train of the To transform the Louvre into a (bourgeois) big-city club.
"I'm not that innocent," Mars whispers, and that he wanted to draw our attention.
(7.8)
Listened briefly:
Tom Liwa - »Another Time«
There are songs that, after just a few bars and a few verses, go straight to your marrow, heart and bones.
And when the chorus comes, you're completely over the moon, want to sob and cheer at the same time, with your chest wide open.
"February Again" is one such song, it's the first from the new album by singer/songwriter Tom Liwa.
In it, and on the album, it's about the big questions about one's own self, the search for meaning and the big shards coming up after decades of muddling around in life and two years of a pandemic.
»Hope nonetheless, love nonetheless, Happy New Year nonetheless«, sings Liwa, who began singing the Flowerpornoes in the late 1980s, in the Distelmeyer style that he had mastered before Blumefld, and one knows: this is the anthem to which one will be in each other's arms on New Year's Eve.
Bob Dylan,
Neil Young, Van Morrison have always looked over Liwa's shoulder, here too, for example in the soul ballad »Hunter«.
But on what may be his 22nd solo album, the 61-year-old from Duisburg once again gathers all of his original songwriting power, chirping in the park, singing from the perspective of women, reflecting his worldview with feverish rumbling rock songs like "Metal". , which could have come from the Psychedelic Furs, had they ever been really psychedelic.
The February meditations end after half a year in Thailand and the »Virgin Birth Blues« meandering and experimental, almost in jazz, with the ten-minute »Almost March on the dream ship Aida«.
And then, in the encores, the completely refreshed veteran shows himself to be very relaxed, folk-flaky and in love with the "unicorn boy",
in Joni Mitchell and Lou Reed ("Live in New York"), until then the rain comes, the lighthouses emerge from the fog and herald spring, perhaps another, better time ("April Scythe").
Tom Liwa is such a lighthouse.
(9.0)
Hawa – »Hadja Bangoura«
This woman has no time to waste: at 15, one of the recent graduates of the New York Philharmonic's composition program, she was fed up with scores and bored with Handel and Haydn.
She turned to her African family roots in West Guinea, where the native Berliner also partly grew up, merging Afrobeat influences with modern electronic R&B full of glitches and atmospheric voids, as designed by FKA Twigs or James Blake.
After an already sensational EP two years ago, their debut album follows on the renowned British indie label 4AD.
It is dedicated to her African grandmother.
The now 22-year-old singer only needs 18 minutes and eleven ultra-short, sometimes sketchy tracks to start with self-produced music and a hoarse,
to create a compellingly sensual ambience with her deep and vulnerable voice, a club or resonance room for her feelings, in which she can let deep bass boom to dance to ("Gemini"), but also tried out muted piano ballads like "Progression".
She wants the respect of the pop industry, said the self-confident career changer in an interview.
Shouldn't be a problem after this show of force.
(7.7)
Moin – »Paste«
Contrary to what the North German-sounding band name would suggest, Moin come from London and belong in the broadest sense to the booming post-postpunk scene there.
The spectrum of »Paste«, the trio's second album, is more post-hardcore if you like such genres and attributions.
As with Shellac, the often improvised and wide-open music revolves around the precise drumming of drummer Valentina Magaletti, along with Joe Andrews and Tom Halstead (both formerly of Raime) play bass, guitars and noises.
But Moin are very far away from the energetic noise of such role models.
Tracks like "In A Tizzy", which consists only of harmonics, background chatter and laughter and other field recordings, emphasize the experimental claim and are reminiscent of Slint, but the best are Moin,
when they put their hardcore skeletons in a tense but also very sensual groove, as in »Wrong Foot« or »Yep Yep«.
The sound, (big city) desert rock by mathematicians, is deeply rooted in the past, but still seems modern to the point.
Think: dry cleaning when Florence Shaw just has nothing to say.
(8.2)
Special Interest - »Endure«
Not quite as elaborate, but compellingly energetic, is the queer-feminist band project Special Interest, which emerged from the DIY scene in New Orleans - and with its second album pushes the audience into a hot, seething cauldron of disco-punk.
Here, too, the pulsing drumbeat is the central element, but it is synthetic and drives a dark, dull, electronic industrial sound;
it's best to imagine a sweaty, dirty, working-class version of Gossip.
The influences of the quartet, led by the charismatic frontwoman Alli Logout, also include acts as diverse as Ministry or Coil, B-52's or classic Chicago house.
It's a wild, eclectic mix that at times sounds like a mid-'90s,
in civilization-dystopian films like Kathryn Bigelow's »Strange Days«, which presented rock music of the future.
This dystopia, fueled by new fascism, stifling gentrification, racism and hate speech online, is now a reality in the lyrics of Logout, who, along with guitarist Maria Elena, started her band in 2020 and a drill (!) amid US protests against police brutality.
The rave track "(Herman's) House" is about Black Panther activist Herman Wallace, who was imprisoned for decades and who was in prison dreaming of his dream house in freedom.
The pounding, furiously jarring soundtrack to
is now a reality in the lyrics of Logout, who launched her band alongside guitarist Maria Elena in 2020 and a drill (!) amid US protests against police brutality.
The rave track "(Herman's) House" is about Black Panther activist Herman Wallace, who was imprisoned for decades and who was in prison dreaming of his dream house in freedom.
The pounding, furiously jarring soundtrack to
is now a reality in the lyrics of Logout, who launched her band alongside guitarist Maria Elena in 2020 and a drill (!) amid US protests against police brutality.
The rave track "(Herman's) House" is about Black Panther activist Herman Wallace, who was imprisoned for decades and who was in prison dreaming of his dream house in freedom.
The pounding, furiously jarring soundtrack to
Prison Riot
delivers this band.
(7.7)
