Album review: The Phoenix Foundation, Give Up Your Dreams

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5 Aug, 2015 05:30 PM3 mins to read

The Phoenix Foundation's Give Up Your Dreams is an adventurous return to form. Photo / Supplied

I must admit my previous undying admiration for Wellington's creative wonder boys The Phoenix Foundation died a little after 2010 album Buffalo which had one great song - that title track - and nothing much else to remember it by. Then along came 2013's Fandango, a double album which ended with a 17-minute song for a finale which also left the feeling of it being an album that you desperately wanted to like but could only manage a grudging admiration for its grand indulgences.

But there have been encouraging signs since that the Phoenix Foundation isn't a lost cause. The first was the exuberant Bob Lennon John Dylan track off last year's Tom's Lunch EP which is reprised on this, their sixth album.

Then there was Big Mac (Run Rate), their casually brilliant pop ode to the Black Caps' captain and rest of the squad during the Cricket World Cup.

And while Give Up Your Dreams may find the Phoenix Foundation, at times, no less indulgent and in thrall to their production skills than they were on Fandango's great prog wallow, it's an album of such propulsive energy, grand melodies and good humour, it's hard not to be sucked in by it all.

Yes, that title might suggest it's something of a downer with the band having a mid life-crisis as they surrender to the void of various career setbacks. But it sure is hard to hear that sense of disappointment over the grandiose throb of the music within.

True, that title track does come with a spoken interlude ("don't let anyone say the world is your oyster/the world is not an oyster") which offers a fairly sardonic reality check.

But there's a largely a celebratory air to much of this - from the infectious Bob Lennon John Dylan, through to the towering choruses of Sunbed, while the closing Myth is a nifty collision of Pink Floyd with Beach Boys vocal swoon before it eventually heads somewhere even stranger.

Elsewhere it's an album with the knobs on the synthesizers, syncopation and psychedelia all turned up higher than the band might have risked before.

That also means some tracks are more workouts in rhythm than pop songs, whether it's Playing Dead, which takes a trip to Tierra Del Fuego via a Talking Heads/LCD Soundsystem-styled pulse; or the Eurodisco of Celestial Bodies or the genuinely trippy Silent Orb.

But this isn't a sound of the band letting its gadgets take over, even when those synthesizers are stomping all over poor Jason and the song's heavenly choir.