Phoenix played Roadrunner – 9/13
The French indie-electro stalwarts returned to Boston for a headliner at Allston’s Roadrunner, with support from Porches.
There’s not many contemporary rock bands doing it all as stylishly as Phoenix. The French foursome (expanded to a six-piece on tour) are at this point veterans, having debuted with United way back in 2000 and spent the ensuing two decades honing their songcraft, visual panache and suave stage presence. It all came together like a finely-tuned machine onstage at Roadrunner last week, their first Boston show in four years.
On tour ahead of the November release of their seventh LP Alpha Zulu, Phoenix took the time to both debut some fresh songs and remind a pumped crowd just how deep their catalog is. The hits came flying out of the gate, with the irresistible “Lisztomania” and “Lasso” from their 2009 opus Wolfgang Amadeus Phoenix bookending a towering “Entertainment” (from 2013’s undersung Bankrupt!) in a spectacular opening salvo. As they have every time I’ve caught them live, the band sounded impossibly tight; synths, Telecasters and the barreling percussion of drummer Thomas Hedlund (whom the band amusingly shares with Swedish post-metal greats Cult of Luna) fusing into an unstoppable force. Vocalist Thomas Mars, a true showman, helmed the whole production with kineticism and that unmistakable airy voice.
Throughout the night, the band ping-ponged effortlessly from their hits to a handful of new songs and the occasional deep cut. Amadeus remains their commercial peak, and they did play most of it, but “1901” and the like hardly did all the heavy lifting. A version of the prog-y mood board “Love Like A Sunset” mashed up with Bankrupt!‘s companion title track amid a heady cosmos-scaling video piece, Ti Amo‘s effervescent “J-Boy” into its own title track was an undeniable 1-2, and even United’s goofy “Funky Squaredance” suite made a fun late set appearance. The handful of Alpha Zulu songs, too, sounded perfectly at home.
And then there were the visuals, presented by a simple but effective three-tiered screen system that somehow made the Roadrunner stage feel even more huge than it already is. The aforementioned “Sunskrupt” backdrop sent the group to space and back, and elsewhere the installation had them performing amid everything from classical architecture to a neon set borrowed straight from Drake’s “Hotline Bling” video. Some IRL touches to the presentation amplified the playful strangeness of it all, including an ominous robed figure appearing to Mars on stage (and later in the balcony, as viewed through the feed from a pair of video-cam glasses projected behind the band) and a piano wheeled out for the frontman to croon atop of towards the night’s end.
In what’s become a signature move of his, Mars departed the stage at the conclusion of the night’s encore (“1901,” of course, followed by a reprise of one of the new songs) to join the crowd, fans eventually holding him aloft, less to sing than to simply be among them as a gesture of gratitude. Classy, straight to the end.
Aaron Maine and band, whose music as Porches has only gotten looser and stranger in the ~6 years since I last saw them, opened the night with a fun and quirky set of outsider pop. Proceed below for photos from both bands.
