In interviews, the members of Phox have a conversational style that reflects the Wisconsin band’s music—it’s playful and thoughtful, serious in its ambitions, but seriously fun when all is said and done. With folk-like delicacy, jazz-like precision and a very indie sense of irreverence, the group’s self-titled Partisan debut is one of the best underground-pop records of the year. These high-school friends will be guest editing magnetmagazine.com all week. Read our brand new feature on them.
The ice cream trucks that patrol East Nashville, or at least those that did the summer of 2009 before I moved back to Wisconsin, would follow such routes that most of the time you could hear two trucks, one hither and one yon, singing haunting, dissonant nursery rhymes almost all day long. As they pulled onto our street, which was the apparent nucleus of their routes, the pitches of the synthesized bells crept up into tune, just for a fleeting moment, as the sweet potential to buy an orange Flintstones push-pop passed by. As memories of middle school summer, and sock hops or sleep overs, of sitting in corn fields with girls your parents didn’t really approve of, bottle rockets, roman candles, the occasional Swisher and yearbook inscriptions like “it was nice sitting next to you in bio. maybe I’ll see u this summer?” fade quickly away, in such an instant the tune slides out of key like a Hitchcock zoom, the background warping, the subject looming. And the truck is just as soon around the corner, and you didn’t want an orange Flintstones push-pop anyway.
