This album could have gone horribly wrong. A seamless, schizophrenic pastiche of stigmatized popular music styles, it might come as no surprise that the French and their unmatched appreciation of cheese have delivered this peculiar specimen. Without batting an eyelash, Phoenix combines chunky metal riffs with jazzy drumming, shifts into a white soul-flavored disco groove, and surrounds it all with production that rings the studio texture of Steely Dan and Hall & Oates into the contemporary dance age. United is one of the most confoundingly brilliant debuts of the year, the type of album that thwarts expectations while affirming music's overwhelming capacity to amaze.

After an all-too-brief exploration of late 70's power-pop on "School's Rules," the Phoenix methodology comes into perspective with "Too Young," a shimmeringly bouncy nugget of disco-pop that puts the Sea and Cake in their place, taking what they do to an unabashed level. This is followed by a smoothly ambling slow-burn soul-jam entitled "Honeymoon." Elsewhere, "If I Ever Feel Better" makes like the Bee Gees were the Beatles, while "Party Time" unleashes supremely accomplished pop/punk that shines in this context.

Having previously served as the backing band for Source labelmates, Air, the shocking thing is not that the boys in Phoenix have the musical agility to pull these various styles off, but that they do so with an irreverent abandon that resurrects these styles and makes them their own. There's a shameless quality to the execution of such a plethora of influences, but it's legitimized by the celebration of music that's inestimably expressed.

The proverbial crest of the album arrives with the nearly 10 minute-long centerpiece, "Funky Squaredance." Beginning ostensibly as a country ballad ornamented by pedal steel, things begin to go awry when vocodered vocals step in to detail an indifferent tale of woe. Then, a sample from a hip-hop party enlivens the track, adding festivities that build with a robotic chant of the title which erupts in the type of charged heavy metal soloing that pulls out every trick in the book. A charged atmosphere of awesome dimensions develops as the soloing progresses, and it all ends with the mechanized chant accompanied by a riff you'd swear was lifted from the Beatles' "I Want You (She's So Heavy)."

Moving beyond the limits of ironic 90's revisionism, Phoenix's sincere recontextualization of the musical fashions of the late 70's and early 80's blazes a trail akin to that of Astralwerks labelmates the Beta Band in terms of the focused eclecticism of sheer aural audacity. They expressively render the past as the future, and United stands as the privileged exemplar of their synthesis of popular culture.

-S. Murray