E-Mail This Article to a Friend The French are coming Phoenix pack their bags for America BY TONY WARE

Guitar cases in hand, hair and clothes equally rumpled, brothers Laurent "Branco" Brancowitz and Christian Mazzalai look more like gutter-punk buskers than like members of Phoenix, a French quartet who have been compared to everyone from Continental compatriots Air to soft-AM touchstones Steely Dan. From the one brother’s threadbare army jacket and the other’s distressed-leather jacket, it would be impossible to divine that either is associated with a band obsessed with textural precision — except maybe from Branco’s shoes, once you get him talking about them.

"If there was a fire in the tour bus, I would only be concerned to save my boots and guitar," he says by phone a few months after an initial interview in a Left Bank café in the St. Germain neighborhood of Paris. "My guitar is my guitar, and I spent 10 years trying to find a good pair of boots, so they are very precious."

This attitude of the uncompromising quest is indicative of Phoenix’s general MO. The band debuted in 2000 with the Astralwerks album United, which was hip enough to earn them a prominently featured track ("Too Young") in 2003’s critically acclaimed Bill Murray film Lost In Translation. Brancowitz and Mazzalai, along with bassist Deck d’Arcy and vocalist Thomas Mars, are back four years later with Alphabetical (Astralwerks), an album that came out in the States in July, and behind which the band are just beginning to tour (they’re at Axis this Tuesday, November 30). Those four years apparently went by quickly for Phoenix.

"The first album we put 20 years into, and now we have to collect two years at a time," Mazzalai told me in Paris. Now on the phone, Branco explains why: "This is very difficult because we have always wanted to go with the purest form of writing and arrangement, to have every note be justified. We look for every option and want to pick the best one. But we are learning to pick one at the beginning and believe in it, because we discovered recently sometimes when you do things quicker they keep a little mystery, a little charm.

"Of course, this attitude is only maybe two weeks old, and I am only really hoping we are going in this direction," Branco continues, laughing. "We might end up doing something completely different. Where we come from, we are white boys playing rock and roll, and when we started our band, that was not stylish. We wanted whatever we did to be stylish, to do things with a vision. So maybe it’s more about trying to do something that makes sense than trying to be perfect."

With Alphabetical, Phoenix may not hit the giddy heights of their sun-dappled and slightly scattered debut, but it’s more cohesive, and more effective in its simplicity. Taut yet breezy production reigns throughout — the kick and snare drums snap, chimes shimmer, and piano plinks atop crisp acoustic guitar, with Thomas Mars crooning pleadingly over blue-eyed, mid-tempo funk-in-a-funk. Alphabetical has a melancholy streak — the process of long nights full of promise spent trying to decipher the day’s jumbled thoughts, according to Branco.

Mazzalai imagines Phoenix’s rhythm as a puma — elegant, but each movement backed by a mounting pressure — while Branco sees Phoenix to this point as riding along a path laid by a caterpillar, each move highly purposeful. And what ties together Phoenix’s sound, an element that would leave almost any studio engineer exasperated but also counts as one of the group’s signatures, is a strict adherence to dry dynamics.

"Since the beginning of the band, we have rehearsed in a basement, and we wanted to record in this place," Branco reveals. "It’s not a proper studio, the walls are parallel, there are so many layers of padding, but we like the sound because it’s our sound. When we play, it sounds like that, dead and dry. When we play live we need volume to be so very high so we can cancel out reverb to make it our own sound. . . . The ’80s was often a bad decade for music. Everything was controlled by, how you say, ‘suits,’ apart from Prince and Michael Jackson. And songs with lots of reverb remind us of the music of our childhood, so maybe our love of a flat sound is a statement against that."

Indeed, Phoenix exist almost in a vacuum. Although they are friends with other French musicians, including Air, Daft Punk, and Sébastien Tellier, Phoenix’s earnest, ephemeral approach is an anomaly. At first glance, for example, Branco’s and Mazzalai’s appearances reveal little about Phoenix’s love of hip-hop dynamics and introspective pop. With Phoenix, there are no overt statements of purpose, nothing like, say, "We wanna rock." But rock they do.

"Right now we are finding our energy from the smell of an audience — this thing creates community and we crave it," Branco declares. "To help us try these new approaches I’ve talked about, we look to the road. For the time being we are gypsies, citizens of the world looking for the energy to put towards new songs."

Phoenix play on Tuesday, November 30, at Axis, 13 Lansdowne Street, in Boston; call 617-262-2437.