Mazzalai counts off each take-Un, deux, trois, quatre!-and plucks the rising guitar line of the part. Each of them plays the harpsichord notes in question on the keyboard and then explains himself to the others. They are having a difficult time finding a way for one person to play live what was recorded on several overdubbed tracks. They seem anxious but focused, going over, again and again, the crescendo of “Armistice,” which builds from a simple, tumbling harpsichord to a surge of guitars, keyboards and pounding drums. The band is in Versailles preparing for the first live shows for their new album, Wolfgang Amadeus Phoenix, since conquering Saturday Night Live in April of this year. This benevolent seduction is the whole plot behind Phoenix’s music: It is so undeniably cool but so effortlessly engaging that, once you drop your preconceived notions of what is French and what is rock & roll and what is acceptable as a responsible journalist, you kind of just want to forget everything else. If this is what it’s really like to be around famous artists, why not move into the guest room, paint watercolors and sip champagne while they play the best songs you have ever heard in the basement? Maybe something magical will happen. It’s not that he and the other members of the band-the aforementioned Deck D’Arcy and brothers Christian Mazzalai and Laurent “Branco” Brancowitz-are overwhelmingly chic and make you swoon to their constant romance (you do that, too), but that they are just genuinely nice people. When Thomas Mars, singer of Phoenix-the only French rock band the world has ever cared about and rightly so-offers you a bottle of wine from his father’s vineyard as you sit in the kitchen of his parents’ beautiful house in Versailles, literally across the street from the palace grounds of Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette, where the band has written and rehearsed every song in its nearly 10-year history and probably before that when it was just 13-year-old Thomas and his friend Deck “banging two notes back and forth,” and you think about all the times you listened to a Phoenix song and wondered what they were like (Are they jerks? Do they party with Daft Punk? What do they eat?)-it becomes very, very difficult to think objectively.