With their debut LP, United, Parisian four-piece Phoenix stunned most of continental Europe. The kids and the critics found that their sparkling, summer sound worked a treat, though they were slightly overlooked here and in the UK. A spell-binding melting pot of almost all genres, Phoenix started by doing Prince covers in bars, but it wasn’t long before they were on stage with Air and Daft Punk and autographing contracts with Astralwerks.
The group write ’70s guitar licks, produce them like Steely Dan, wrap them around Chic-esque percussion, gel it together with a layer of Hammond organ and decorate the mix with a sparkling production sheen. That sounds awful, right? But that was the beauty: the band pulled it off because the songwriting was strong enough to validate their esthetic choices.
So now it’s four years later and Phoenix have had to grapple with that difficult second album. Alphabetical certainly picks up where United left us; the Americana idiom is still there, juxtaposed with drum machines, synths and playful pop structures. This works on the title track and the opener, ‘Everything Is Everything’, makes you smile and wiggle your hips as it should. That said, this is more of a grower than United was ever going to be, and they no longer have the naivety and stylistic freshness that save them the element of surprise, so their whole paradigm becomes somewhat grating on tunes like ‘Victim Of The Crime’.
Phoenix are drawing on the same sources but it’s less satisfying because they stray into the clichéd territory which they so skilfully avoided before. I was one of those who made United my album of summer ’00, and some tunes on Alphabetical are really charming, but it’s not quite the triumph I hoped it would be.