The Daily Spin, September 29
Phantogram | Three
Welcome back to the Daily Spin, the series in which I review 365 albums during 2023.
Each album will be given a rating on a scale from 0 to 10. You can look at the entire set here. Additionally, you can check out a list of my favorite song from each album right here.
Album: Three (2016)
Artist: Phantogram
Link:
Phantogram have never been afraid to step out of the box and challenge standards - through a CHVRCHES-like approach to electronic pop paired with a Muse-friendly rock presence, there’s a hefty oomph to the darkly psychedelic music that the band creates.
No truer has this been than on 2016’s Three, the band’s most successful album (reaching a peak of number 9 on the charts) - an album that takes all of the wonky electronica and the cutting rock, pairs it with viciously apt lyrics, and turns it into one of the most emotive records of 2016.
The duo is absolutely at their best when they really let it fly free - the album’s most popular tracks, ‘You Don’t Get Me High Anymore’ and ‘Answer’, both cut to the utter quick, the former a floaty vocal over a synth riff that almost feels violent, like staring at the end of the world through a giant push of sound, all while the latter completely inverts this, taking a piano loop and evoking jazz nights that spiral into brutally desperate chaos, the breakdown of a relationship as the guitar unleashes itself and both vocalists scrabble for hold on the chasm’s edge.
Sat between those two, buffers on each side, is ‘Barking Dog’ - a standout for how different it sounds to the rest of the album, certainly, but also for its brutal lyrics and message - a narrator on the precipice of death slipping through that liminal space between. While the rest of the album whipsaws around Phantogram’s strengths, building and growing, this instead takes loops and lets them simply play out, unchangeable at the core. What’s done is done, and there’s no sense trying to put broken things back together with tape and empty promises.
It’s this wrought devastation that Phantogram conveys so efficiently here, like a highly-trained Mission Impossible-type figure clearing out a room of goons - it surprises, devastates, and eludes with the brutal efficiency of someone finely-tuned to execute this exact premise. I love it.
Rating: 9.2/10
Best Tracks: You Don’t Get Me High Anymore; Answer; Barking Dog
Worst Tracks: Calling All