Yahoo! Music Album Review

Released on 15/05/06
Label: Virgin

"He was playing all this great music," sighs Bill Murray down the phone to his wife in "Lost In Translation", having just returned from a wild party at the house of a Japanese fashionista. "I have to find out what it was". Well, Bill, if you'd read the tracklisting on your accompanying soundtrack CD you'd have discovered the band were Phoenix, and the song "Too Young" from 2000's unhyped (except by Japanese fashionistas) "United", an alt. pop curio which precipitated a mass swoon amongst hipsters and music hacks bored of the singer-songwriter revolution and mindful to the retro charms of the '80s but appalled by that year's risible comeback attempts by Erasure and Sheena Easton.

With stereotypical Gallic insouciance, the Versailles-based four-piece of Thomas Mars (vocals / bedroom walls), Christian Mazzalai, Laurent Brancowitz (both guitar) and Deck D'Arcy (bass / guitar / keyboards), lounged about for four years before releasing the American FM rock-influenced follow up to "Alphabetical", whose key track "Everything Is Everything" became the song most likely to accompany your buying of t-shirts in Top Shop.

Despite this happy marriage of fine tunes and critical goodwill, a breakthrough has eluded them. "It's Never Been Like That", however, may just be the blow that fells the wall: its charms sink their teeth in fast and deep. That's not to say they've done a Snow Patrol style 'release-two-underground-discs-then-sell -your-granny' about-face, rather that it's rawer, less studied, less groomed-sounding sibling to its two predecessors - they sound like a live band twitching with urgency, rather than studio-based gentlemen painstakingly tweaking swooshy sounds in between discussions on Guy Debord.

Opening salvo "Napoleon Says" has a single, repeated, neow-neow guitar note sounding like an alarm and building to a New Radicals-ish chorus. The sequence is repeated to increasingly thrilling effect, and punctuated with scoffing laughs and joky references to the band's Frenchness, and perhaps their quarry's Britishness - "Napoleon says take off your coat / Take off your long johns too". The tone is universally upbeat. "Consolation Prizes" could be a Champs-Elysees-frequenting Housemartins, while the catchy "Rally" channels a tambourine-tapping Lemonheadsy sunniness. "Long Distance Call" is a perfectly-paced lesson in how to make collar-grabbing modern power pop.

Playful as a rabble of sans culottes, refreshing as a Channel breeze, and steeped in the sort of Gallic pseudo-intellectualism ("I'm going to read every novel you read / I'm gonna learn Egyptian" - the bobbing "Courtesy Laughs") that has given impressionable female exchange students hot flushes since William The Conqueror's day. God (and Bill Murray) willing, there'll soon be no excuse for not knowing their name.

    by Anna Britten