9/11/2023 0 Comments Phoenix wolfgang amadeus phoenix![]() For the second album in a row, Phoenix had honed in on an immensely appealing aesthetic and applied it to a batch of pop songs so effervescent you might not notice the meticulous craftsmanship. The glory of Wolfgang Amadeus Phoenix is that its other nine tracks are in the same league as “1901.” Some of them might even be better. For once, the Recording Academy got it right. A month later it crested at #1 on the alternative charts, right around the time Phoenix won the Grammy for Best Alternative Album. It wouldn’t reach its #84 peak on the Billboard Hot 100 until January 2010. ![]() Remarkably, “1901” still had a ways to climb. A voiceover touted the SRX as “the Cadillac of crossovers,” a description that worked just as well for the song in the ad. For one luxury automaker, it was out with “ Rock And Roll,” in with French indie pop. Soon you could hear “1901” in both Gossip Girl and the rebooted Melrose Place, in PlayStation ads and PlayStation games alike. (Watching them kick out the jams before Crystal Castles and Girl Talk was the highlight of my one and only trip to Bonnaroo choosing the aforementioned MGMT over Nine Inch Nails was my biggest mistake.) Thus, the eventual onslaught of syncs felt inevitable. They maintained a ridiculous schedule throughout 2009, appearing on every late-night TV show and at seemingly every festival in the world. And then the album dropped, summer kicked in, and “1901” was everywhere. Or was it just me who long assumed Mars was singing, “Fallin’, fallin’, fallin’, fallin'”? (Real lyrics: “Fold it, fold it, fold it, fold it!”) Phoenix fans immediately dug it, and soon indie listeners in general did too. The way those keyboard blasts sliced across that steady Strokes guitar churn made for a hell of a hook even before Mars beamed in with his holographic melodies, capped off by a hall-of-fame mondegreen for a chorus. Whichever direction they were moving, “1901” was the sort of song that makes you want to come along, sleek and propulsive and absurdly catchy - also just plain absurd, thanks to Mars’ notoriously inscrutable lyrics. After all, “Guitarist Laurent Brancowitz was in a band with Thomas Bangalter and Guy-Manuel de Homem-Christo aka Daft Punk once upon a day.” Brancowitz himself saw Wolfgang Amadeus Phoenix as a return to the sophisticated gloss of the band’s debut United, before they had the bright idea to turn indie rock into yacht rock, although in the same interview frontman Thomas Mars proclaimed, “The last record was about our present, this one is about our future.” “It’s logical growth, really,” my Stereogum predecessor Amrit Singh blogged at the time. But when Phoenix released “1901” at the end of winter, its synth-powered update on the lite guitar-pop mastery of It’s Never Been Like That simply sounded great. Nowadays it sounds like a car commercial because that’s exactly what it became. The album turns 10 years old this Saturday, and in keeping with the rising tide of 2009 nostalgia, it’s time to flash back. The year was 2009 the song was “1901.” Even more so than “ My Girls,” “ Two Weeks,” and “Stillness Is The Move” - and arguably only eclipsed by the long-tail dominance of Oracular Spectacular’s troika of hits - the lead single from Phoenix’s cheekily titled Wolfgang Amadeus Phoenix became the ambient hum of the year’s indie crossover boom.
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