In a recent interview asking about everything but almost nothing about the music: Thomas Mars and Laurent Brancowitz are in attendance, and Brancowitz, after a few confused looks and moments of awkward silence, introduces "Alpha Zulu" with great patience , but a few words as an album "on the weird side" before, as one of their strange albums.
Then he says with a typical Phoenix smile: "The best songs are the ones that you find strange when you first hear them." Which of course he's right about, as is usually the case - and that's the most important thing about Phoenix' seventh album.
Elena Witzeck
Editor in the Feuilleton.
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But it's not that easy with this band, which has been successful for more than twenty years, and whose album "Wolfgang Amadeus Phoenix" from 2009 was the so-called soundtrack of the so-called Generation Y.
Maybe you want to score points with your knowledge and understand all the references from art and film, all the references to the zeitgeist of the new millennium and include them when you meet them.
And maybe at the same moment you remember the evenings of complete freedom and exuberance and the feeling when you could hear that unmistakable Phoenix electro sound and you were constantly alternating between grateful, melancholic and enthusiastic.
There are many such praises, you don't even have to meet the band for them.
Again, some of the strongest songs on “Alpha Zulu” were heard months ago.
"Identical", which was created shortly after the death of producer Philippe Zdar, who accompanied the band for years and died falling from a balcony in 2019.
The energy that drove him and passed on to all the bands he worked with, Daft Punk, Stardust and Phoenix, this inner strength and all the suffering about his sudden and senseless disappearance and the search for what remains of him, are in this song that became the title track of Sofia Coppola's film On the Rocks: "Gazing around the corner of the university.
Can't call it out, but keep calling you out loud."
Great references and great emotion
And as is so often the case with Phoenix, that longing intertwines with indie-esque comfort, which of course is only temporary, like being briefly placed in a cotton ball to gather strength.
"Take my advice, make your mistakes.
I'm right next to you."
Then there's the cover song, which is a must-see on video because New York filmmaker Pascal Teixeira, in the style of the fabulous mocking app "Reface" that lets you make any face - among others - sing, portrays the characters in historical nodding and humming and dancing along with the paintings.
And there's the duo with Ezra Koenig from Vampire Weekend, the band Phoenix associates with, for example the sound of the voices of both singers.
"Tonight" is the song that is most reminiscent of the big disco hits, like "Lisztomania" or "1901".
Phoenix recorded some of the songs in the empty Louvre during the pandemic.
So again a mystical place, at least when it's not overrun by people;
a place where past and present overlap,
So there they are again, the big references: the title "Alpha Zulu" refers to the first and last letters in the NATO spelling alphabet, the cover of the album shows Botticelli's "Maria mit Kind und Engelschor" without Maria, but with a glaring screen, over which the angels bend as if they had never done anything else.
And the Louvre video is somehow reminiscent of Jean-Luc Godard, who had just died.
But apart from that, it's again about what moves us in the heart.
Closeness, distance, devotion, loneliness, farewell, grief, hope.
And to feel as much of it as possible, you have to go to a concert.
How convenient that Phoenix are just starting their European tour.
Alpha Zulu (Glassnote), available November 4th