Pitchfork

Maybe it's the French heritage, or their collaborations with new-age dabblers Air, but Phoenix has proven itself a band in touch enough with its feminine side to embrace the dulcet tones and oxymoronic world of soft rock. With production as crisp as a Frito and singer Thomas Mars' mercury croon, the group has assembled two brilliant singles ("If I Ever Feel Better" and "Everything Is Everything") that could slot into the playlists of hipsters and receptionists alike. Yet Phoenix haven't quite been able to stretch their minty-fresh sound over the length of an album, with too much of both Alphabetical and United floating off into the atmosphere.

The approach of It's Never Been Like That reflects an awareness of this shortcoming, as the band seeks a more consistent sound through mimicking the sloppier styles of those uncouth Americans-- in particular the Strokes. Loosening their ties and unbuttoning their cuffs, Phoenix put on their best slouch, slathering the album with messy, naturalistic guitar playing completely at odds with their usual robotic aesthetic. This earnest attempt at a costume change fails...but at the same time creates the uncomfortable dynamic that makes it Phoenix's best album.

For all the effort made to un-slick their sound, Phoenix just can't keep their OCD meticulousness at bay, utilizing all that slapdash guitar as a cued sonic preset no different from familiar tools like the string-synth and disco-bass. Maybe that modular usage sounds like a bad thing, but instead the interplay between lazy strumming and everything-in-its-right-place arrangements effectively rewrites the history of the garage-rock revival, drawing a line between "Last Nite" and Tom Petty and erasing the denial that "Maps" was the biggest song that scene's brief heyday produced. The tools in "Consolation Prizes" and "Second to None" may be the same, but replacing studied ennui with a breezy joie de vivre prevents the pop essence from being overly diluted by rumpled poses.

Here the band improves on its usual success rate by depositing not one, but two showstopper tracks. "Long Distance Call" embodies the disconnect between shamble and sheen better than anything else on the album, with the band alternately stomping the gas and the brake to lurch between their easy-listening older material and the happily polluted new image. "Courtesy Laughs" highlights the record's second half with a simple chord progression made transcendent by its metronome rhythm. Both tracks still could have remained middle-quartile indie pop without the carefully calibrated cool of Mars' vocals, operating at conversation-level volume and casually, smoothly hitting his marks without protracted strain even when enthusiastically incanting the album's title.

At under 40 minutes long, It's Never Been Like That is pretty much a sprint, though even at this short distance the band starts to sound a bit dehydrated on both five-minute instrumental "North" and the over-long "Sometimes in a Fall". But through most of the record, Phoenix marks out their territory in the sparsely-attended arena of new soft-rock and demonstrating the genre's compatibility with indie tropes. Dentists sick of REO Speedwagon ballads send their sincere thanks.