The French are well known for many things: silly flat hats, garlic drenched snails, phallic monuments, royal be-headings, and more varieties of cheese and wine than a single country should be allowed to lay claim to. What the French are not known for is music. I will concede that there’s Chopin, Edith Piaf, and the Gipsy Kings – but for the most part, more than a millennium of French history has passed without much musical impact on the rest of the world. [Photos by Arielle Stevenson]
Mind you, I’m not saying Phoenix [pictured] are the best thing to ever happen to French music; I personally feel they share that title with Air and Daft Punk. What I am saying is that no one can argue Phoenix's domination over world-wide music charts last year was unexpected and nothing short of extraordinary. Seemingly overnight the band’s fourth studio album, Wolfgang Amadeus Phoenix, took them from being a relatively unknown alternative band to Grammy-winning, festival headlining superstars. Last Tuesday night's show at House of Blues in Orlando, Phoenix delivered a set that reminded everyone in attendance of why they’ve achieved this level of success.
Pitchfork darlings, Wavves, opened the show with their surf-influenced punk-pop. Their albums hadn’t made much of an impression on me prior to the show (vocalist/guitarist Nathan Williams’ one man act is an annoying combination of angst and fluff), and their performance did little to change my mind. Though the late Jay Reatard’s backing band seems to have slightly improved Wavves sound, drummer Billy Hayes and bassist Stephen Pope delivering the garage-punk I was expecting (down to Pope’s cut-off t-shirt and headbanging hairstyle), I wasn’t very impressed overall. Williams is a talented guitarist and can even play with a beer can as a slide, which, if nothing else, is a neat party trick; unfortunately it doesn't hide that the songs all sound similar and lyrics are totally unintelligible. Judging by the crowd's apathetic reaction, the only discernible lyric of the evening,“So Bored," pretty much summed up the performance.
The crowd's reaction to Phoenix, on the other hand, was instant jubilation that never seemed to wane throughout the band's performance. From the moment they took the stage in a fog of dry ice and blazing strobe lights and launched into "Liztomania," Phoenix kept the energy on high and the audience rapt with attention.
This article appears in Oct 28 – Nov 3, 2010.