For having opted for a Californian sound since his first album, United (2000), has Phoenix yielded to the nonchalant rhythm of the West Coast? It’s been five years since we were practically without news – apart from the song Identical For the movie On The Rocks (2020) by Sofia Coppola, wife of singer Thomas Mars – from this group born in Chesnay (Yvelines), near Versailles, and which became one of the national export champions, while their friends from Daft Punk were active. Grammy Award winners for the album Wolfgang Amadeus Phoenix (2009), those who had the honor of playing at Madison Square Garden in New York as well as at the Hollywood Bowl made their big comeback on Friday June 3 at the Art Rock festival in Saint-Brieuc (Côtes-d’Armor ). First name on the poster and with a delay due to the downpours that poured before their passage.
Upstream was launched a new dance single, Alpha Zulu, which does not indicate a conversion to Johnny Clegg’s mbaqanga, but a borrowing from the international aeronautical alphabet. The album, fully recorded and in the mixing phase, will feature ten tracks like all those that preceded it and should be delivered in September. Guitarist and keyboardist Christian Mazzalai admits that his band prefers hedonism to constraint: “We try to have a good time and we make the pleasure last, for example with ten-day residencies in Los Angeles and Tokyo”.
Pleasure of reunion
And Phoenix refuses nothing since for this seventh studio album, the group was able to settle for two years at the Museum of Decorative Arts, in the Marsan wing of the Louvre Palace in Paris. Delighted to be in such a setting, following the vagaries of confinement. “For the first time since we were 15, we were separated, with Thomas, found Christian Mazzalai. For nine months, when we had never been for more than a month. » Thomas Mars was indeed absent in Belize and Napa Valley (California) to bring back visions of wounds from Egypt: “Fires, only the locusts were missing”. “All the albums coming out today are steeped in the pandemiche adds, this one is too, but it will be rather bright ».
This pleasure of reunion was in any case tangible at Art Rock. Phoenix has enough irony to continue to claim its Versailles origins with an entrance on stage to baroque music for Roi-Soleil, and later images from the Hall of Mirrors. Sometimes decried for a superficial “cool attitude”, of which the refuge behind the English language would be the first symptom, he above all demonstrates a very thorough professionalism, in the best sense of the term: his grandiosity allowing one to admire the interaction between the guitar “cocottes”, enrolled in the New York school of Talking Heads, and the keyboard layers, all supported by a superhuman drummer, Thomas Hedlund – who usually officiates in the Swedish metal group Cult of Luna; splendid lights around pop art monochromes of bright colors.
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