Mars is too amiable a vocalist to express pure disillusionment, but he’s great at communicating discomfort. 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.”
Lead single “Entertainment” shares its name with Gang of Four’s debut album and also a similar self-awareness of commodifying their art.
Wolfgang amadeus phoenix album art full#
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%. 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.”īut on Bankrupt!, that sense of confusion is so pervasive it practically coheres into concept-album formalism.
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. 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. And through that process, Thomas Mars’ lyrics became Phoenix’s most frivolous yet essential quality.