The Warlocks - Phoenix

1. Shake the Dope Out
2. Hurricane Heart Attack
3. Inside Outside
4. Isolation
5. Cosmic Letdown
6. Red Rooster
7. Baby Blue
8. Stickman Blues
9. The Dope Feels Good
10. Oh Shadie

I was born in the early 60s, and well remember growing up in a world full of colour and protest, where clashing shades of clothing were as much a part of daily life and daily comment as students clashing with police, assassinations, anti-war rallies, and the emergence of counter-culture revolutionaries. As a teenager, I went on to experience the upsurge of British punk, and the sheer unstoppability of simple tunes played with meaning. To many of our generation, today's music demonstrates how much has been lost over the intervening years, with the emphasis shifting from the thrill of personal freedom to the mind-numbing complacency of getting a good job, having the latest mobile phone, and watching the latest drip-feed reality soap on TV - "Just Say No" taken to new heights. No to thinking, no to self-awareness, no to just about every challenge that adds spice to what might otherwise be a dull monotonous existence.

Against this background, listening to Phoenix is a joy. It's by no means "easy listening", although some tracks are certainly poppy enough to be singles. But these are interspersed from time to time with lengthy monotone drones that force you to take the entire album much more seriously as a piece of modern experimentalism. This is all to the good - this kind of music shouldn't be easy but true to life, and like true life it should have its ups and downs.

The band's influences have variously been listed as including the Velvet Underground and the Rolling Stones, and the surface similarities are certainly there to be heard. But again, I can't help feeling that the rock critics are being too superficial, because the Warlocks have their own style and are good enough to be judged on their own merits - there really does seem very little point comparing modern tracks to stuff we heard half a lifetime ago. Let's just listen to the music and consider it for what it is, the output of a twenty-first century band living in a twenty-first century world, experiencing and reflecting a culture collapsing under the weight of its own indifference, and finding solace in the nihilism of narcomania. Post-millennial angst come home to roost.

If we actually do this, actually throw away the pat comparisons and music industry clichés, we will surely be better able to judge Phoenix as a work of musical artifice. And what a work it is. Solid rhythms, psychedelic pauses, drifting soundscapes, single-note developments that linger like concepts trapped in time. Phoenix is a record out of time, neither contemporary nor retrospective, but spanning the divide between the music of my childhood and the music of the third millennium. A record that needs, perhaps, slightly more listening to than we've become used to, but one which repays the effort many times over.

This is a seriously good CD.