"Alone, alone, alone," croons Thomas Mars at a choice moment on the new Phoenix album, "Bankrupt!," repeating the refrain thrice more before shifting gears. The song he's singing is "SOS in Bel Air," and the wry premise behind its title - distress signals emitting from privileged enclaves - could easily be applied to the album. For a band that has exploited the whims of style as briskly as Phoenix, this rings of self-conflicted social critique, though it's neither critical nor conflicted enough.
Phoenix, originally from Versailles, France, released its first album in 2000, but it was only with "Wolfgang Amadeus Phoenix" (Glassnote), in 2009, that the band found traction with a mainstream audience. If the first few Phoenix albums sounded like the work of a rock band coolly hijacking elements of dance music, "Wolfgang" suggested a dance-music producer's sleek idea of a rock band.
In no time Phoenix found itself on late-night television and on ever-bigger stages. Headlining at the Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival in Indio, Calif., a couple of weeks ago, the band trotted out R. Kelly to perform "Ignition (1901 Remix)," a mashup of hit songs from both camps. (Phoenix is about to go back on tour, and will play a sold-out show at the Apollo Theater on May 13.)
Because of all this - and because "Bankrupt!" includes a tune called "Bourgeois" and an abundance of lyrical disaffection elsewhere - some early commentators have labeled it Phoenix's "post-success" album. Maybe that’s an accurate judgment; maybe it submits to an intentional fallacy.
What Mars tells us himself is willfully inconclusive. "Tell me that you want me," he sings on "Trying to Be Cool," the album's most appealing mentholated-disco tune, though his plea seems to come with air quotation marks. The title track contains a dull instrumental preamble followed by a typical word salad: "Spray pesticide," and "Self-entitled portrait," and "Forever is for everyone else." The segue from a song called "Drakkar Noir" to one called "Chloroform" feels like a dig at predatory masculinity.
More intriguingly, there's "Entertainment," the album's lead single and opening track, in which Mars seems to offer himself up for consumption while synthesizers trawl an East Asian scale, tracing a garish pop exoticism that the song's video makes explicit. "What I once refused to be/Is everything they long together," he sings in the chorus, adding, "I'd rather be alone."
Later, in "Oblique City," which closes the album, he lands on that word again: "Am I gonna do this alone?/They're 50,000 versus one." And ambivalence or no, what comes shortly thereafter is an invitation, or a challenge: "Come on, come out and get me."
