-PHOENIX WINS GRAMMY FOR BEST ALTERNATIVE ALBUM!!!
-Phoenix's album Wolfgang Amadeus Phoenix has been nominated for the Best Alternative Album GRAMMY!!!
-Check out the new New York, I Love You trailer featuring Phoenix's
-Check out Phoenix on AOL’s
- Check out "1901" complete with its own custom theme featured in Tap Tap Revenge, the hottest game on the iPhone and iPod Touch. Play it this weekend for a chance at TWO VIP PASSES to a Phoenix show on the September US tour (some exclusions apply) -- or one of five runner-up prizes of an album & autographed poster! For the complete details check out the
-Go to Xbox live for free exclusive behind the scenes footage of Phoenix in the studio!
-Vote for Phoenix's new video "1901" on Fuse's
-Phoenix debuts at #37 on the Billboard Top 200!
-“1901” added to Music Choice and Fuse!
-“1901” is currently the #2 most played video on mtvu.com
-“1901” featured in current online iPod Shuffle Ad featured on sites such as people, pitchfork, nylon, etc.
-"1901" is being played on over 20 stations, this week added @ WFNX, WLUM, KTNI AND KRBZ ,Top 10 @ kcrw and #3 @ kexp!
-Wolfgang Amadeus Phoenix is now available
-Rhapsody has named Phoenix the for the month of May!
-Check out Phoenix performance on SNL! For more SNL Footage click
While it's true that you have to wait for inspiration
to strike, there’s comfort in knowing it will inevitably arise, even if you
have to look all over the globe for it before you find it—or so goes the
logic behind the epic recording process of Phoenix's new studio album. To write
their new album, titled Wolfgang Amadeus Phoenix and released this May on Glassnote
Records and Loyaute (the band’s own imprint), the Gallic quartet decamped
to various locales away from their home studio in Versailles, searching for the
stimulus necessary to transform the new material into a coherent LP. "We
spent a long time waiting for the chemical reaction," says guitarist Laurent
Brancowitz, "that moment when a song isn't just the sum of all of our parts,
but it's something more. And the idea was to go someplace we'd never been."
Actually, they went to a few: Brancowitz and his bandmates Thomas Mars (vocals),
Christian Mazzalai (guitar), and Deck D'Arcy (bass) worked in the Parisian studio
of 19th-century Romantic painter Théodore Géricault ("The light
was beautiful," Brancowitz says), chartered a houseboat on the Seine ("Not
the best idea—some of us got seasick"), and stayed at the Bowery Hotel
in New York City for a month, among others. As the guitarist explains with self-effacing
humor, "It was like our Orson Welles moment."
As you'd expect,
the traveling took its toll, leaving only a trip back from whence they came as
a means of allowing the songs to gel, this time in the Montmartre home of Philippe
Zdar, the producer known for his work as half of French house duo Cassius. Zdar,
a longtime friend, lent Phoenix his studio and wound up producing the record alongside
the band—the first time Phoenix has recruited outside help. "He's very
European, very dramatic," says Mars. "We worked in his studio for a
year and a half, so he was around the songs. He had a lot of good comments that
helped shape them. There was no in between with him; either the songs were great
or we'd ruined them. Every day was either time to open a bottle of Champagne or
to go home depressed."
The results collected on Wolfgang demonstrate
a kind of deliberate, considered approach, and in turn, they’ve created what
is the best album in their already-amazing catalogue. Featuring the band's signature
melding of synthetics and organics, of sharp, danceable rhythms and intense guitars,
of effortless melody with a considerable dose of aural panache, the album's ten
songs are more layered than previous efforts. "On our last album, we were
trying to make a minimalist record—something austere, almost ascetic,"
Brancowitz explains. "This time we wanted to create something more elaborate."
That's evident on electro-tinged slow jams like "Fences," the sweeping
and mostly instrumental "Love Like a Sunset," and the spirited pop of
lead-off track "Lisztomania," on which Mars sings the transcendent chorus,
"Like a riot, like a riot, oh!/ I'm not easily offended/ It's not hard to
let it go/ From a mess to the masses." On first listen, his lyrics might
seem obscure, but Mars definitely intends to reference the Hungarian composer:
"Franz Liszt was the rock star of his day," he explains. "Other
musicians hated him for getting all the girls; his concerts were out of control.
This song's about playing live, the romantic beauty of a crazy crowd...and about
the loneliness of still being one in a group of many."
That self-reflexive
quality informs Wolfgang, as does Phoenix's sensibility—a nostalgic, vaguely
melancholic vision of the way things ought to have been. "It's a little bit
of a fantasy," Mars says. "We wanted to create an optimistic vision
of the future for ourselves." His references are clear: The title of "1901,"
for instance, refers to year after the Exposition Universelle in Paris, which
Mars describes as the city's "most futuristic moment" (and which, incidentally,
popularized Art Nouveau). The same can be said of the album's title—a blending
of the classic and the upstart. "It's both unacceptable and unforgettable,"
says Brancowitz. "In a way, it redefines what you can and can't do. My mother
is German, and she hates the title. I'm taking that as a sign that we're doing
something right."
The four men of Phoenix are a close-knit group of
childhood friends from Versailles, which Mars calls "one of the most beautiful
cities in France, but a place without a soundtrack. People don't listen to music
there." Nevertheless, the foursome have deep roots in the modern French music
scene: Brancowitz, for instance, who is Mazzalai's older brother, played in a
band called Darlin' with Guy Manuel de Homem-Christo and Thomas Bangalter, later
to become Daft Punk. Phoenix, meanwhile, was formally founded after they performed
backing Air for a few shows in the UK. Mars also sang the vocal on Air's "Playground
Love" which appeared on the soundtrack to The Virgin Suicides (the film introduced
him to his girlfriend, Sofia Coppola). The band then released their debut, United,
whose song "Too Young" became an underground hit when Coppola used it
in Lost in Translation; they followed up with Alphabetical in 2004, a critically
acclaimed record whose labored creation took almost two years and produced precise,
measured material like "Everything Is Everything" (so endearing them
to then-Dior Homme menswear designer Hedi Slimane that he commissioned the band
to provide music for one of his runway shows); and followed that up with 2006's
It's Never Been Like That, a much rawer collection of rock ‘n’ roll
gems.
Though they're obviously fond of the studio, they say that playing
shows is what's sustained them most over the years. As Brancowitz says, "What
I love most about playing live is the feeling that you can fail," he says.
"It's always a gamble as to how well it's going to come across. But what
makes it good is that you have to fight for it. Our friendship is what keeps us
together. We're a gang, and when we're all working together, it can be beautiful."
