The Phoenix Foundation — Pegasus

The Phoenix Foun­da­tion’s sec­ond album Pega­sus is out now, and has fol­lowed the lead of recent releas­es of fel­low Welling­ton bands Fat Fred­dy’s Drop (Based on a True Sto­ry) and Shi­had (Love is the New Hate) by going straight into the top 10 of the NZ album charts.

Ten years ago it would have been unthink­able that three of the ten top-sell­ing albums in the coun­try would be from New Zealand bands, let alone bands from our fair city (in fact, if you include all the NZ bands, with The Feel­ers and Breaks Co-Op, half the top 10 is home­grown). How many small cities around the world, can boast sim­i­lar pro­por­tions of suc­cess in their nation­al charts? Not many, etc…

And it’s not just some jin­go­is­tic NZ music month mar­ket­ing coup. The Phoenix Foun­da­tion’s alt-coun­try, pop, instru­men­tal, and occa­sion­al­ly prog-rock­ish album is all class, and has been on high-rotate at Welling­ton­ist Tow­ers over the last week. From the bass-dri­ven and theremin laced instru­men­tal spook­i­ness of the first sin­gle ‘Hitch­cock’ (accom­pa­nied by an incred­i­ble video from Rueben Suther­land, soon to be show­cased at the onedotzero9 fes­ti­val at Lon­don’s ICA along­side the most inno­v­a­tive music videos of the past year), to the wig­gly gui­tar clas­sic that is new sin­gle ‘Damn the Riv­er’, the whole album is a gem.

The band are tour­ing in June and July (play­ing in Welling­ton at Indi­go on the 24th June), and their live per­for­mances are, if pos­si­ble, even more bril­liant than their record­ed efforts, so it goes with­out say­ing that we rec­om­mend you head along.

Some use­ful links…

• Buy the Pega­sus CD at Real Groovy
• Buy and pre­view MP3s from Ampli­fi­er
• Phoenix Foun­da­tion Home­page
• Inter­view with Grant Smithies in the Sun­day Star Times