The Phoenix Foundation
Buffalo
Wellington, New Zealand’s The Phoenix Foundation have been together for over a decade, enjoying acclaim at home, but making painstaking progress globally. Released on NZ’s ultra-credible Flying Nun label, 2007’s Happy Ending kick-started interest overseas, but it’s taken a veritable age for TPF’s fourth album Buffalo (released domestically in April 2010) to score a UK release, finally arriving under the auspices Memphis Industries.
Still, this delay is no terrible thing, as TPF arrive very much matured into the finished article. The band in no way reinvents the wheel, but their dreamy, synth-heavy spin on Byrds/Beach Boys-style pop is immaculately crafted. Certainly it’s hard to believe a 19-year-old dweeb in his bedroom would be liable to come up with a pop song as perfectly overwhelming as Buffalo’s title-track, a sweet, dreamy jangle that’s abruptly hoiked into the stratosphere by an incandescent synth arpeggio of astonishing vitality. And such are the chops brought to bear on Orange & Mango that a truly dreadful chorus lyric (“It takes two to tango / Like an orange and a mango”) doesn’t really get in the way of it splendour, reminiscent of the poppier moments of Sufjan Stevens’ mighty Illinois.
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