Phoenix are a total anachronism-- can you name another post-millennial power-pop band of thirtysomethings that made the jump from cult curio to festival headliners 10 years and four albums into their career? But if their trajectory feels old-fashioned, the French foursome are so perfectly emblematic of our present. Sure, you could chalk up the surprise, runaway success of 2009's Wolfgang Amadeus Phoenix as some fortuitously timed, crossover-appealing fusion of big-tent indie anthems and glossy synth sheen; but then, this band has embraced huge hooks and smooth moves since day one. Really, Phoenix started making the big dollars once they stopped making sense: By intensifying the jiterry energy introduced on 2006’s It’s Never Been Like That, with Wolfgang, they perfected an ADD-via-ESL approach to pop that matched the pace of our hyperactive, distracted, smartphone-sucking lives.
And through that process, Thomas Mars’ lyrics became Phoenix’s most frivolous yet essential quality. Once a heart-on-sleeve romantic, the frontman now revels in jabbering out seemingly intelligible, ultimately inscrutable streams of words, starting one sentence only to finish another, as if he writes songs by making random copy-and-paste errors. Phoenix songs are that party conversation you weren't really paying attention to or didn't fully understand, but to which you nod in agreement anyway; you don't so much sing along as tentatively mouth along, like when you're doing karaoke and realize you don't know the words to your favorite song. Part way through the band’s fifth album*, Bankrupt!*, Mars even drops a kooky chorus line that doubles as an advertisement for the band’s addictively tuneful disarray: “It’s a jingle jungle/ Jingle junkie-junkie jumble.”
But on Bankrupt!, that sense of confusion is so pervasive it practically coheres into concept-album formalism. Even with Mars’ whimsical wordplay in full effect, the band’s fifth album scans very much as a post-success commentary, the sound of a band who, just two albums ago, was making dates for protest rallies, but now finds itself hobnobbing with the 1%. Lead single “Entertainment” shares its name with Gang of Four’s debut album and also a similar self-awareness of commodifying their art. In the wake of a deliriously ascendant, laser-beamed chorus that’ll give the band’s lighting guy a perfect excuse to shine the house high beams on some festival crowd, the music cuts out and Mars blithely admits, “I’d rather be alone.”
Mars is too amiable a vocalist to express pure disillusionment, but he’s great at communicating discomfort. Bankrupt! doesn’t so much ruefully reflect upon Phoenix’s whirlwind, globe-trotting lifestyle as drop you right in the middle of it. Its K-pop synth melodies and snapshots of Californian glamor and Scandinavian leather give you that sensation of seeing the world but only as a blur from the backseat of your chaffeured car, as you’re whisked from after-party to after-party for just enough time to make bullshit small talk and exchange contact info with people you have no intention of ever contacting. On the album’s heart-racing standout “S.O.S. in Bel Air”, Mars agitatedly shouts out the title as if summoning some sort of Bat signal escape from high-society banality; on the belt-it-out power ballad “Bourgeois”, he tosses a life-saver to a girl stuck bartending for fat cats on a cruise ship. And tellingly, a song named for d-bag cologne-of-choice “Drakkar Noir” is paired with one titled “Chloroform”, the implication being that they’re both just as toxic: the former equates its titular fragrance with sleazy seduction, the latter is a devastating slow jam that chronicles the inevitable morning-after kick to the curb, with Mars delivering the album’s most lucid and frank line: “I don’t like it if you miss me/ Why would I long for you?”
But if Bankrupt! catalogues a set of circumstances Phoenix never expected to find themselves in, they’ve at least grown accustomed to their surroundings. After all, the album rarely deviates from Wolfgang Amadeus Phoenix’s winning formula; befitting the band’s ascendant status, everything’s just that much more shiny, jacked-up, and frantic. But the more-is-more approach fails them on the now-customary moody mid-album odyssey: Compared to previous downtempo turns like It's Never Been Like That's “North” and Wolfgang's two-part “Love Like a Sunset”, Bankrupt!’s seven-minute title track is less a cool comedown than a colossal brick that threatens to sink the whole record. The typical Phoenix song is already overstuffed with melodic change-ups, quirky instrumental flourishes, and fragementary logic; this concerted effort to go prog proper-- with its awkward hodge-podge of space-age bachelor-pad synth doodle, Vangelisian sci-fi soundscape, and forlorn folk ballad-- can’t help but sound forced and undercooked by contrast.
It's not the only moment on Bankrupt! where you wish Phoenix would stop overthinking and let their songs accrue a more natural momentum. Although “Don’t” begins as another fine addition to the band’s repertoire of snappy, post-Strokes skip-along jaunts, it’s derailed by a plaintive, saggy chorus that makes the song feel a lot longer than it is. Bankrupt! is most effective when blurring the line between celebrating decadence and reeling from it, as on the deceptively exuberant closer “Oblique City”, whose title presumably serves as a stand-in for any random stop on the band’s tour itinerary. It’s a song that seemingly celebrates the freedom of not knowing what city you’re waking up in, capturing the momentary rush you get from all the busy streets and massive neon-lit Coca-Cola ads. But couched within its boisterous bustle is a cry for help ringing out of the executive suite at 3 a.m.: “Am I gonna do this alone?,” Mars sings, a contradictory bookend to his anti-social “Entertainment” salvo, but one that encapsulates Bankrupt!’s conflicted, unsettled essence. The song’s synth-buzzed whirr eventually dissolves into gentle acoustic picking, but you know it’s just a brief moment of calm before Mars must brace himself to face another jingle-jungle morning.
