Phoenix

Phoenix are one more time into extreme relevance. Coming back with a new album, 18 months after Alphabetical and 30 Days Ago, their live album released within the 30 days that followed their 2004-05 tour (150 dates across 3 continents). After their last show in August 2005, they decided to stay away from reality and get straight into the next album process.

Four Parisian boys with brotherly love, set out for Berlin last summer, settling down at Planet Roc studios, in former East Germany, without a single song written but determined to write, record and produce their third album themselves with no outside participation and no compromises.

The studio is a no man?s land haunted by the ghosts of a past state radio, a people?s cooperative for a future better recorded world. In the huge and shady spaces, post Bauhaus architectural extravagance and unreal surroundings, the boys set themselves the task of writing as they recorded, without any idea as to what it might feel or sound like.

?There is a brutality to the record,? says Thomas Mars, Phoenix?s photogenic mouthpiece, stumbling across a cross fader in their Versailles studio, ?This was about starting all over, making ourselves scared again & telling the truth.? If there is the kind of scrubbed-up freshness you might expect to hear on a particularly striking debut album to the four- strong Frenchmen?s third record, there is a reason for that.

It?s Never Been Like That was conceived with a live mentality, in a straight line, summing up a lot of the band?s emotions and past experiences, sometimes conflicting, often disrupting. All the songs are autobiographic and set down emotional equations where disillusion and exaltation try to find a common language.

This is a romantic album although very rigorously made. Rhythms are hard, arrangements straightforward, violently simple and close to the bone: 2 guitars, 1 bass, drums and a 4-month deadline.