Phoenix by Shervin Lainez
If all you know about the indie-pop gents of Phoenix are the late-aughts singles “1901” and “Lisztomania,” you may be pleasantly surprised to find out that they’d been around for more than a decade prior. You would have found them in 1998 playing behind a remix of “Kelly Watch The Stars,” by the French duo Air, or in 2001 on the soundtrack for HBO’s “Six Feet Under.”
Licensing Phoenix for TV soundtracks — “The O.C.,” “Gossip Girl,” “Grey’s Anatomy,” “Veronica Mars” — became a sly way to code for millennial hipness. And then Phoenix’s smash 2009 album, “Wolfgang Amadeus Phoenix,” won a Grammy and endeared these lads from Versailles to just about everybody outside the land of Marie Antoinette.
Another decade-plus hence, Phoenix are still popping. Their seventh studio album, “Alpha Zulu,” has won them renewed praise for their spry tunes and stylish grooves, and landed them on a summer U.S. jaunt with the mighty Beck, their collaborator on a shiny new retro-electro romp called “Odyssey.”
Singing in English — because as frontman Thomas Mars once observed, that’s the language of pop “and it doesn’t work to replace things, you know” — Phoenix embody a spirit of willingness to work hard and make consistently great music while audiences catch up.
By the time they played Coachella in 2013, their cool-band bona fides were set and Phoenix could do as they pleased. Placing a song (“1901”) on the sports video-game soundtrack for “NBA 2K13” (not to mention “NHL 2K10”) is a sure-fire way to measure success in America. Recording your latest album at nights inside the Louvre — Phoenix did this during Covid lockdown — is a sure-fire way to measure success everywhere else.
Being in a working band is hard. It’s a full-time job that often pays nothing and doesn’t always turn out the way it’s supposed to. But there’s nothing like having no choice. In the case of Phoenix, the path was set before them and luckily for us they’ve followed it all the way up.
Phoenix play 7pm Tuesday, November 14 at Revolution Live in Fort Lauderdale. wearephoenix.com ~ Tim Moffatt
