Here's the bad news. If you work for Phoenix's record label, you should know that Bankrupt! contains no obvious hits, beyond the already played-out 'Entertainment'; no earworms in waiting to rival 'Lisztomania', '1901', 'Lasso' or 'Fences'.
Despite the lack of surefire mega-hits, and that cheeky title, Bankrupt! doesn't suffer from a shortage of creativity or ambition, and it's certainly no rush job. It's not their Human After All. Nor is this a 'difficult' record; not really. Sure, their attitude towards time signatures and genre restrictions is as cavalier as ever, but there are still countless pop hooks on display here.
The problem is that so few of them stick. And I don't just mean that in the sense that you'll forget them a few days after you listen to the album; I mean that you'll forget them while you're listening to that song, as the band plunge headlong into another direction. Some of these songs sound like they were constructed from spare parts, with nothing holding them together.
Consider the title track, this album's obvious answer to Wolfgang Amadeus Phoenix's 'Love Like A Sunset'. Where that track was arguably the highlight of that album, a dark, menacing instrumental that built on itself until eventually bursting into the sunlight, 'Bankrupt!' feels like a patchwork quilt constructed out of whatever half-formed instrumentals they had lying around, transitioning awkwardly from tranquil noodling to Philip Glass-lite atmospherics and back again.
When guitarist Laurent Brancowitz said the album would sound like "a sphere made of marble" that's been polished for a year, I took that to be a good thing — or, at worst, a bit of meaningless self-indulgence. It turns out Branco has nailed the album's biggest flaw. Phoenix (and producer Phillipe Zdar) have simply spent too long polishing their marbles, submerging these tunes and sacrificing their immediacy as they fell in love with their much-ballyhooed Harrison 4032 solid-state recording console (the exact same one Michael Jackson recorded Thriller on, don'cha know).
There are a lot of synths on Bankrupt!, and they're often the only thing holding the album together, as they feature prominently on every track (or plague them, depending how you look at it). They can be intrusive, particularly on 'Drakkar Noir'. It's a song graced by a darkly enigmatic vocal performance and cursed by cheap and cheerful synth sounds, but no doubt the contrast was deliberate.
For all these reasons, Bankrupt! is likely to be the first Phoenix album — after a decade of incremental gains, and the stratospheric success of Wolfgang Amadeus Phoenix — that sees them go backwards in terms of popularity and critical acclaim. But it certainly isn't without its pleasures.
Before he started going on about marbles, Branco said that with Bankrupt!, "the more you listen, the more you hear, and the more you really understand what's going on", and he's right about that, too. Songs that didn't immediately click with me have slowly begun to take hold. Even as I write this review with the record blaring in the background, my opinion of tracks like 'The Real Thing', 'SOS In Bel Air' and 'Chloroform' has begun to soften.
One track that did work for me immediately was 'Trying To Be Cool', a distinct throwback to the band's early sound. While Daft Punk are, from all reports, about to reinvent themselves as a live R&B band on Random Access Memories, their ex-bandmate Branco was running that lane over a decade ago with Phoenix.
Their first two albums, United and Alphabetical, rode grooves that seemed to vanish from their repertoire when they reinvented themselves as (more or less) a pop rock band on It's Never Been Like That, and it's great to hear that side of the band again on 'Trying To Be Cool'. It's a track that will slide right into diehard fans' top ten lists. (It's also nice of Mars to play the underdog card with that title, when we all know he's cooler than we'll ever be.)
Here's the good news. If you don't work for Phoenix's record label, or an ad agency looking to soundtrack that new Cadillac commercial or romantic comedy trailer, you don't need to give a fuck about whether or not the album spawns another hit single (a somewhat arbitrary marker of success at the best of times, but never more than now). You can simply relax, and let Bankrupt! wash over you, as its makers surely intended.
Chances are it'll win us over eventually.
3.5/5
