The way those keyboard blasts sliced across that steady Strokes guitar churn made for a hell of a hook even before Mars beamed in with his holographic melodies, capped off by a hall-of-fame mondegreen for a chorus. Whichever direction they were moving, “1901” was the sort of song that makes you want to come along, sleek and propulsive and absurdly catchy - also just plain absurd, thanks to Mars’ notoriously inscrutable lyrics. After all, “Guitarist Laurent Brancowitz was in a band with Thomas Bangalter and Guy-Manuel de Homem-Christo aka Daft Punk once upon a day.” Brancowitz himself saw Wolfgang Amadeus Phoenix as a return to the sophisticated gloss of the band’s debut United, before they had the bright idea to turn indie rock into yacht rock, although in the same interview frontman Thomas Mars proclaimed, “The last record was about our present, this one is about our future.” “It’s logical growth, really,” my Stereogum predecessor Amrit Singh blogged at the time. But when Phoenix released “1901” at the end of winter, its synth-powered update on the lite guitar-pop mastery of It’s Never Been Like That simply sounded great. Nowadays it sounds like a car commercial because that’s exactly what it became. The album turns 10 years old this Saturday, and in keeping with the rising tide of 2009 nostalgia, it’s time to flash back. The year was 2009 the song was “1901.” Even more so than “ My Girls,” “ Two Weeks,” and “Stillness Is The Move” - and arguably only eclipsed by the long-tail dominance of Oracular Spectacular’s troika of hits - the lead single from Phoenix’s cheekily titled Wolfgang Amadeus Phoenix became the ambient hum of the year’s indie crossover boom.
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