Just as the reality of classical music extends beyond perceptions of puritanical elitism, the music of Phoenix demonstrates that art-rock doesn’t have to be pretentious and pop music can still be literate. Rather, the world of Thomas Mars, and Franz Liszt for that matter, is brimming with culture crashes and collapses, far-flung fusions and collages. In “Lisztomania”, Mars casts the classical virtuoso as a modern subject of decadence — a hypersexual, alcoholic, business-savvy, sports-car speeding, volatile romantic — culled from literary and cinematic sources as assorted as The Great Gatsby, American Gigolo, and Federico Fellini’s adaptation of an Edgar Allan Poe story Toby Dammit. Ask Mars about what music influenced the album and the closest the singer gets to dropping an actual band name is referencing the Talking Heads documentary Stop Making Sense before continuing his survey of film from the ’60s and ’70s (Shampoo, Claude Lelouch’s 1976 short C’était un Rendez-vous).  ”There are a lot of influences,” Mars concludes, “that we all put together like build your own Frankenstein.”
     For all intents and purposes, Phoenix is a band that defiantly draws inspiration from patently non-musical sources. Certainly they are not the first band to claim such, but perhaps this privileging of textural and visual sources may also mark the presence of musicians fully matured and wholly able to access talents already at their disposal. That said, the tale of Frankenstein, a monster assembled from disparate parts that embarks on a wild rampage, proves an appropriate analogy to Phoenix’s process — or at least the process they prefer. According to Mars, making this record “was more like a commando unit. No thinking. No preconceived ideas. No sense of good taste, bad taste. Things have nothing to do [with each other] except for the fact that they were done by the same people.”
     And while this zest for bedlam may be hard to fathom upon hearing Wolfgang’s polished pop and taut grooves, Mars admits that once the guys are on stage, a monster is indeed let loose: “I see our live show as fireworks. Even if it’s timed perfectly you still want something to happen that is chaotic. There’s something about playing in front of live crowds that is like fireworks. I am looking for the grand finale. I love the chaos.” Such fireworks were proudly on display with Phoenix’s recent performance on Saturday Night Live, where the band joined the select company of Paul McCartney and U2 as musical guests invited to play three songs on the program, a detail that both inspires and frightens Mars. “It was my favorite experience so far on TV. I loved it. I was so scared, [which] was the best way to present our music. Because there’s so much fear you can fail at any second, [it] is the most precious thing. It’s something we worship, that is essential for creating.”
     Mars maintains that teetering on the edge of complete crash constitutes the goal of every Phoenix gig: “It’s all about a contradiction. With the live shows you really want to mess with [expectations], when you do not know who is on the stage anymore, when the crowd is on stage, the band is in the mosh pit. We just like to play with the limits.”