Phoenix: Bankrupt! Review

Four years is quite a victory lap to take for any band. It's not unheard of by any stretch of the imagination (when, oh when will we get more Tame Impala?), but it's the kind of gap that always worries me. What is taking so long? I get that tours, introspection, etc can slow the process down from the more common 2 year cycle (although that is maybe being a little stingy I'll admit), but it's enough time to let the worst case ideas take root. Maybe that's the end of the band? Maybe they lost a member? Or maybe, in the case of Phoenix, they're doing a tone shift.

Yes, the band with a single mode has finally seen what putting some dang joy into your music can do, and they've gone full tilt for it. What was once a stodgy but well crafted music machine is now throwing bips and boops into their new, spacious arena rock album. The leather jackets of strummy trad-rock are still here, but the laser show....well that's new. So maybe the victory lap wasn't a long break after all, as Phoenix strut through 10 tracks joyously on their follow up to their biggest album, Bankrupt!.

In hindsight, this was the correct decision. It's tempting to just want more of Wolfgang Amadeus, considering just how easy that album was to put on and love. The growth the band had made over their previous efforts made it hard to go back, and it's again a big step this time around. That's immediately obvious if you listen to even 30 seconds of any song on this album, as anything on here is drenched in hazy, shimmering distortions. If things sounded more open on Wolfgang, this sounds 20x more open than that.

One thing hasn't changed one bit: Thomas Mars will always sound detached, and he will always be double-tracked. On one hand, this approach gives the music a calling card of sorts; you can always tell Mars' voice. Hey, he could sound like Brandon Flowers, barely keeping control of his vocal cords long enough to pass through the correct note. On the other hand....he could sound like Brandon Flowers, with some of the same joy the rest of the album has.

And what a joyous album this is. Liberal use of pentatonic scale, layerings of humming amps, more echo in the recording, it's all the type of music I would guess a band planning a world tour would want to make. Everything here screams arena rock, and I think they knew it. It's hard not to compare what they're doing here to what The Killers had done since day one, for better or for worse.

Now, I wouldn't call Phoenix particularly inspired with their lyrical prowess, but they've shown clever use of lyrics in the past outside of being deep. The downside of that is, well, there's not much meat on these bones. At least Flowers wants to bear his soul; Phoenix can barely show their teeth, and they've done at least that in the past. Wolfgang was able to provide hints at sadness despite the uptempo cadence, but it just doesn't show here.

The construction of songs has taken a hit as well. Most of the songs aren't the typical rock fare of four chords--they're at least smarter than that, and that's no small feat. There's a big gap, though, between baby's first chord progression and Beethoven. Nothing here is as grabbing as their smash hit 1901 in terms of motif, no hook sticks in your brain, and no lyrics play with the measures. There's even a mid-album wordless interlude that tries to capture the moodiness of Love Like a Sunset Part 1 from their previous LP, and ends up just being aimless noise.

It smells of a sellout, much like what many people said at the turning point of Coldplay's career: Mylo Xyloto. And much like that, it's just really hard to reconcile the tone shift. Maybe this was always the kind of music Phoenix wanted to make. Maybe they're just having a musical epiphany and are overexcited. Maybe they caught lightning in a bottle and never will again. Or maybe it's just hard to make good music in every facet. This album is every bit as listenable as their previous. I think they've gotten better at their sonic landscapes. But it's one step forward, one step back.

6/10