At the top of my Play List is Wolfgang Amadeus Phoenix by the French rock band, Phoenix.

When the album was released at the end of May, Rob Harvilla had this to say about it in the Village Voice:

"As with the Pulitzer Prize, an esteemed and inviolable committee - a slightly larger one in this case, as it comprises the entire American public - convenes annually to bestow glory upon the Official Song of the Summer....I mention this because Phoenix, a gang of nonchalantly exuberant maximalist-pop Frenchmen, have now submitted, for committee review, their fourth record, a nine-song affair with, coincidentally, nine viable Official Song of the Summer candidates. This is gorgeous weather, summer vacation and ice-cream truck proliferation incarnate."

I agree wholeheartedly.

So why do I love this music so much?

1. - The lyrics make no sense.  Yet this absence of coherence enables the songs to shift and slide from one rhythmic structure to another, giving the songs spontaneity and a free-associative fluidity.

2.  They make up their own words, and then proceed to mis-pronounce them.  I mean, what's 'jugulate' supposed to mean? You can go back to the Latin root and speculate, but only Phoenix know for sure.

3.  In spite of the exhuberance, the songs are suffused with a melancholy - just count the times 'lonely' and 'lonesome' are vocalised by the lead singer Thomas Mars.

Harvilla finishes off his review by saying: "The question isn't so much whether it could capably soundtrack our imminent summer, but whether we're capable of having a summer worthy of it."

I don't know about you guys, but over here the summer simply hasn't been worthy of what Phoenix have bestowed.

Last week we had St. Swithin's Day - a day which has consequences for the rest of the summer, as the old Elizabethan poem describes:

St. Swithin's day if thou dost rain
For forty days it will remain
St Swithin's day if thou be fair
For forty days will rain nae mair.

Unfortunately, the weather that day was a mixture of sun, wind and rain - an unsettled turbulence which has been with us ever since.

But Phoenix have provided for even this eventuality singing: "We're sick, sick, sick, sick, sick, sick, sick, sick, sick, sick, sick for the big sun." 

 The infectiousness of their music is even more enhanced seeing them live. They'll be touring the States across the month of September, including a sold-out concert in Central Park on September 25th.

 So what's all this got to do with the movies?? Well, Phoenix - along with their french soul brothers, Air - have been involved with the music for the films of Sophia Coppola.  Phoenix were involved in both Lost in Translation and Marie Antoinette. In fact, the  moment I most treasure from Marie Antoinette is the sight of the Phoenix guys all gussied up as the Petit Trianon Musicians, holding their 18th century instruments.

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What's going to become of us Vampire Hunters? They keep changing the rules, moving the goalposts.

Once, it was just a matter of the swift thrust of a wooden stake right to the vampire's heart, and that was them finished off.

Nowadays it's not so easy.

In the old days a bolt of sunlight was enough. Remember how, in Nosferatu, the skeletal Count Orlok vaporizes when he is hit with the light of the rising sun; or how Christopher Lee melts into a Technicolor mess in Hammer's production of Dracula - whereas in Twilight, Robert Pattison lounges in the sunlight, his skin glowing as if covered in diamonds.

How thrilling was the sight of Van Helsing - the Vampire Hunter extraordinaire - cowing a host of vampires by waving a cross in their terrified faces, in contrast, check out True Blood: A woman covers up a huge cross with a flag in a church where a vampire is going to give a talk saying that the cross would 'sizzle him up like fat-back bacon.' The vampire enters the church and nonchalantly removes the flag exposing the cross, saying as he does so: 'As you can see, I didn't burst into flames.'

In vampire lore a young maiden was safe if she draped her bedroom in garlic, but in Korea - where Thirst is set - every dish is seasoned with garlic, so vampires are immune.

In the early years of Universal horror, Bela Lugosi could transform himself into a bat and flit from one place to another - from creepy woods to rooms in stately homes - at will. But in the Swedish vampire film, Let the Right One In, the vampire has to ask permission to enter the house, and if she's refused entrance, blood begins pouring from her body.

Bram Stoker wrote the Dracula novel as a way of reflecting the tensions in late Victorian socciety, in the same way that Mary Shelley wrote Frankenstein to warn about the dangers that science could unleash.
But what accounts for the sudden appearance of vampires in the past year? They're even advertising razors!

What's the world coming to??

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