The French have got serious form when it comes to twisting the determinedly uncool into something hip, a fact Phoenix illustrated so winningly last year with Wolfgang Amadeus Phoenix, a beautifully crafted album of mid-tempo soft rock which lounged dreamily in some critic-proof holding area between the mid-Seventies and early Eighties.
At last night’s Edinburgh show they opened with the ridiculously pleasing sounds of “Lizstomania”, an almost perfect pop confection and, judging by the audience’s unhinged reaction, now a bona fide anthem. It’s the song that most defines the Phoenix sound – somewhere between Buggles, ELO, the Strokes and Daft Punk - and therein lay the problem.
The rest of the set – though crammed with fine songs like “Fences”, “Girlfriend” and “Rome” - was full of echoes and imitations on that original theme, punched out with little fanfare at a cruising speed that rarely varied. Not that it was in any sense bad, but you did end up thinking that Phoenix only really have one song, and they do seem to enjoy playing it over and over again.
There were a few breaks in the pace, most of them taken from previous records: the Bo Diddley beat of “Consolation Prizes” and, especially, the loping skank of “Run Run Run” from 2004’s Alphabeticals, were robust, meaty and provided a very welcome break in the weather. The proggy two-parter “Love Like a Sunset” was also a mood-changer, even if it was rather tiresomely indulgent.
Expanded to a six-piece live, Phoenix were a much more solid proposition on stage than on record, but the nuances they bring to the studio – the interplay between precision and playfulness; the air of intellectual daftness – were almost entirely lost. More prosaically, Mars’s voice wasn’t loud enough. He certainly put his all into it, though, darting and diving around the stage, which was strafed by stark white blasts of light, interspersed by rolling waves of red and orange and darting geometric puzzles which lent the proceedings a genuine sense of spectacle.
The encore began with a very sweet voice-and-guitar version of an old French language track - over which most of the crowd yapped and bellowed; clearly it wasn’t enough like “Lizstomania” for the masses – and ended with “1901”, their second most euphoric song. Everybody - myself included - had a good time, but after a full year of touring Wolfgang Amadeus Phoenix this is one band who need a new song to sing.
Watch an acoustic version of "Lizstomania" (YouTube):
