Album Review: Phantogram February 17, 2010 3 comments	By Aaron

A phantogram is an image that has been color adjusted in order to make the picture, with the help of 3-D glasses, emerge from the page with new-found fidelity. Immediately upon settling the needle down on the imaginary vinyl of Eyelid Movies, the rookie album from the New York duo that record as Phantogram, the sound emerges in much the same manner… it seems to diffuse out from the speakers, a highly textured mixture of viscous sexuality and fearless mystery-pop that requires no special glasses to tickle your amygdala.

I have always asked myself the question ‘What will music sound like in ten years?’, and usually I come up with a generally far-fetched image of some total fucking weirdos making music that is a distant cousin of our relatively blaise current music. Generally that idea is disproved, although music does evolve, and yes, performers continue to get stranger. I am not usually disappointed, but I am a bit baffled at music’s predilection for recalling old tones and tunes and presenting them as new, and some genres’ musical oeuvre is so narrow that any progressive move would put new material in another category. Phantogram’s new album has come the closest possible to fitting my imaginary mold of some of the future aspects of music. It relentlessly blends styles, keeps sonically pleasant tones in mind, and doesn’t skimp on the quality for the sake of sounding authentic or ‘indie’.

For me, the best music evokes not an immediate emotional response or motivation, but rather summons a vaguely interrelated cloud of adjectives. I have prepared two graphs to give my best shot at scientifically explaining what happens when virgin ears happen to run into Phantogram’s album. The first is an interrelated scatter chart of adjectives in an (X,Y) arrangement with ‘cool’ on the X axis and ‘strange’ on the Y axis, and the second is a pie chart attempting to account for the dozens of influences one will encounter on Eyelid Movies.

Ten pervasive adjectives are listed on the left, and they form the basis for the left to right flow of the infographic. As we can easily see, initial reactions of the ‘strange’ variety give way immediately to a growing trend toward ‘cool’. As the album progresses, strange moments pop in here and there (consider a song titled ‘Futuristic Casket’, which starts out with gangster rap beats, yet ends with tender xylophone arpeggios), but the prevailing feel is that this is an unflaggingly hip, dark, and exciting album. Etiolated means bleached by lack of sunlight, by the way.

The next chart offers a detailed analysis of the songcraft and sonic texture of the album in terms of possible influences. The three strongest are Serge Gainsbourg, a deceased French songwriter (whom the band themselves cite as their prime influence), the Postal Service, and the Cardigans. Other influences are peppered in without abandon… I could have sliced this pie into slivers trying to characterize single songs, let alone the entire thing.

To wrap this up, this is an amazing debut album. My only regret is that it will be some time before we can hear new material from Phantogram, but I’m keeping my fingers crossed for a 2011 follow-up.

8.5/10

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