Perhaps Phoenix will one day rise again.
French synth-pop group Phoenix may have named its fifth studio album Bankrupt!, but the band hardly sounds desperate. Its irresistible and latest album, 2009’s Wolfgang Amadeus Phoenix,was fresh and exciting, showcasing a group in complete, unwavering control of its sonic direction.
Bankrupt! is cut from a similar musical cloth as Wolfgang, pairing an affection for Moog synthesizers with the simple, reliable crunch of a New Order-esque guitar. That being said, the synths have become omnipresent and overbearing. Throughout the record, balanced melodic passages transition awkwardly into dark, atonal electronic jams.
Wolfgang was an album of space and calculated emptiness — no sounds were excessively loud in the mix, which made tiny flourishes such as the bass line on “Lisztomania” instantly memorable.
On the other hand, Bankrupt! is overstuffed, yielding a frustrating, unenjoyable sensory experience that probably could have been amended with some stronger production work. The songs themselves aren’t particularly revelatory, functioning as templates that should have been enhanced with better mixing and leveling.
The title track starts off gorgeously, blooming from a soft guitar-laden interlude into an interstellar wash of Strawberry Jam synthesizers. Yet lead singer Thomas Mars ruins the song with some pointless babbling about fashion and someone with “feathery eyes,” all over what could be a scrapped Spacemen 3 outtake.
Mars’ hyperbolic and utterly nonsensical lyrics threaten to tank the whole album. If he were a more charismatic front man, it would perhaps be possible to forgive his bad writing. While Julian Casablancas’ magnetism somewhat redeemed The Strokes’ mediocre most recent record, Comedown Machine, Mars comes across as the flattest, most mundane singer ever.
Take the plucky “Drakkar Noir,” for example. The band almost successfully channels recent tourmate Mac DeMarco on the song, which, for an odd moment, sounds eerily like “The Stars Keep On Calling My Name” from DeMarco’s brilliantly low-key 2. It fails because the humorless Mars mangles everything with his crushing sincerity. You can close your eyes and imagine DeMarco having a good yuk on the chorus, “Jangle jungle/ Jingle jump before you stumble,” but Mars croons those same words like a lovelorn poet or a hazzan on Yom Kippur.
Only the big stomp on “Chloroform” — which tries slinky chillwave on for size — and the single “Entertainment” seem to break through the doldrums.
Overall, this is not a bad record by any means. It’s just one with a whole slew of problems, some fixable and some unfixable. I’d argue the band hardly needs Mars. Better production work and memorable songs, though, are things to work on. Then maybe Bankrupt!, like its telling title, wouldn’t seem so hollow and empty.
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