Album Review: Give Up Your Dreams by The Phoenix Foundation

Wellington’s Phoenix Foundation are big enough at home for their sixth album to have entered the New Zealand chart at No 2, but their lush, cosmic abstractions haven’t made much commercial headway elsewhere. The album’s title was inspired by a friend’s prediction that they would always be big fish in a small pond, which gave them the freedom to regroup and acknowledge a love of the same 70s pop that begat Metronomy’s The English Riviera. The jaunty title track sardonically appraises their prospects (“Now we’re older, are we even part of the scene?”), but prospects are evidently less important than the need to saturate songs in whipped-cream harmonies (prog-lite opener Mountain) and Eaglesish twilit mellowness (Jason).

Full Review >>

Do you dream in colour, or in black and white? Colours and dreams are defiantly Technicolor and subscribed to, with the vibe definitely in the ‘out there’ category, as Kiwi psych-rockers The Phoenix Foundation blast off for their self-produced sixth album orbit. Slipping under the public radar until fourth album Buffalo brought them to wider attention, they’ve been creating works that have been described as ‘growers’ for a number of years. Sharing a love of psych-rock favoured by fellow antipodeans Tame Impala and Unknown Mortal Orchestra hopefully won’t see them veering into the 80’s-cheese cul-de-sac that the other two seem to have opted for, after delivering previous albums of invention and character.

Full Review >>

You know about the big releases each week, but what about the smaller albums which may have passed underneath your radar? We’ve rounded up five of the best new album releases from this week, from the Titus Andronicus’ five-act epic to the power-pop of EZTV: don’t miss out..

Full Review >>