Album Review: The Phoenix Foundation - Fandango
- Written by Danielle Gibson
Fandango is studio album number five and the follow up to The Phoenix Foundation’s highly acclaimed 2011 release Buffalo. It’s their longest album to date and possibly their most progressive and ambitious.
The majority of songs range from five to eight minutes but then the final track ‘Friendly Society’ will test your patience by being 17 minutes long. It wears thin and although it appears to develop as a progression the evolution of the song doesn’t hold out. The first half progresses well but after ten minutes it falters and the ideas appear forced and so it's doomed for the remainder. But what does make this song fit in well with the album is that come down from the rest of the songs. At the end we're left with a peaceful drone which is fitting for the psychedelic feel that is present in the bulk of Fandango.
Co-frontman Samuel Flynn Scott has mentioned that “This is Test Match music - maybe its prog or psyche-folk - whatever it is it's music that we thought about a lot, worked on a lot and cared about in the minutiae.” This double album is 78 minutes long and expands over the psychedelic genre which the band have not condensed or hurried for the sake of the masses.
The album opens with the bleary ‘Black Mold’ which is slow building and comforting. Intense lyrics like “We’re living in darkness in a river of shit” and "Villas in the mist, in the valley of the saggy, where the sun will never kiss, and it's a nice little place, and it's cosy I suppose, if you don't mind living in a never-ending war with black mould" really make this relaxing tune quite bleak but don’t let that tear you away from the rest of the album.
Songs like the hallucinatory ‘Supernatural’ are uplifting and take you away from reality whilst the Pink Floyd-esque ‘Inside Me Dead’ mesmerises the listener, in a not at all depressing fashion.
‘The Captain’ is certainly a hit with its summery hazy melody; it’s like you should be sitting back and chilling out with a pint of cider. Lukasz Buda’s vocals are seamlessly relaxing against the symphonic strings and fanfares.
Although there is the same psychedelic feeling throughout the album each song has its own story. Fandango is certainly something else. It’s a trip you need to sit down and take from start to finish to really appreciate the effort the band put into it.
Fandango is out now and available from amazon