No sex please, we’re British! Possibly reaffirming a few prejudices held among hardcore Brexiteers about those Europeans all being happy-handed perverts – Sexiteers, let’s call them – it’s frisky Frenchies Phoenix with their sixth album Ti Amo. It takes its title from the expression the Italians reserve for the most carnal form of love – the Italians being so loving they have a two-grade system for expressing such feelings – and Phoenix describe it as being all about “simple, pure emotions: love, desire, lust and innocence”. The perverts!
Everyone else with functioning ears and libido should be set to fall for this Versailles synth-fiddling alt-pop foursome anew, like it’s the first date all over again. After finally whittling down their vast potential into a properly great album at the fourth attempt in 2009’s Grammy-winning Wolfgang Amadeus Phoenix, Phoenix scored their highest chart placings globally with 2013’s Bankrupt! Recorded in an old theatre in Paris, Ti Amo continues the rich run of form with a glossy, neon-hued, ’80s-vintage fantasy of an Italian disco with Giorgio Moroder on the decks until dawn.
“We’re meant to get it on”, coos Mars, already in need of a cold shower
If lead single J-Boy (“just because of you”) doesn’t grab you straight away with its variously dirty and starry synth lines, thrusting gated snare drum and the bit when singer Thomas Mars literally purrs like a cat, it will definitely get you with its mere suggestive wink of a guitar break. As well as being the sexiest song on the album – “we’re meant to get it on”, coos Mars, already in need of a cold shower – astral slow-jam Fior di Latte is also the sexiest song ever named after cheese.
With its baroque synthesiser flourishes like fingers fluttering up your spine, Lovelife could be early-’80s Human League reprogrammed by Phoenix’s fellow countrymen and vintage-synth fetishists M83. On the new-wavey Telefono, Mars dials his girl in a different time zone to sensitively ponder “how can I sleep when you’re wide awake?”, before the song fades out on the same duvet-fluffy chords it faded in on. Remainers – as in those who sometimes like to remain in bed all day, doing that thing beds are made for besides sleeping (nope, Sexiteers, not reading the Daily Mail) – this is the make-out record to make your summer.
