Love Like A Sunset — Phoenix

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B5Lh9uyx1Zw

This is a song with movements; it could have been arranged for an orchestra, but it's produced in modern-pop style, with electronics and guitars and filtered vocals. It has stylistic transition periods at 3:46, 5:20, 5:47. It grows slowly and builds to a climax, cutting out and turning in on itself, and then reversing. It has structure. This is a song that takes patience to listen to, and more patience to write and record. This from a Paris garage rock band. I don't know or want to know the context, history, intentions for this song; its lyrics are meaningless; its chord structure is perfunctory. It performs one function, and that is to build and release, and it does this very, very well.

A lot of music tries to do everything — and I promised I wouldn't compare apples and oranges — it tries to provide storytelling, inspirational lyrics, a new sound, a frontman worthy of idolatry, a dance beat; it tries to be moving and uplifting. Any big band has to meet these checkmarks; they need to inspire and refresh and be new and different and brilliant, and where they falter, they are judged. But a tiny garage rock band from Paris, France needs only to satisfy their own aesthetics, and that is where Phoenix succeeds so succinctly.