Artists Condensed: Air, Part One

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Submitted by msarko on 11/17/09 8:16pm
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I have a deep love and respect for recording artists who occupy one of those single-slot places in the sonic landscape. There needs to be no more and no less than one Rufus Wainwright, Raveonettes, Bat For Lashes, or today's entry, Air. The French duo consisting of Nicolas Godin and Jean-Benoit Dunckel plays a mix of jazz, trip-hop and pop that I'm not sure anyone else could do and I'm certain nobody else could do so well. Air has been recording since around 1996 and they just released their most recent album, Love 2, a couple months ago. Now is a good time to take a look back at what these slick Versailles natives have contributed over the past decade. In today's entry, we'll be going over some of Air's more natural, analog-style music, especially their chilled-out jazz interpretations.

Air's first release was an EP called Premiers Symptomes that was mostly just low-tempo jazz with some electronic tweaks here and there. The music in that album is what Sean Connery's Bond wished he could have had scoring his movies. As much as I like this stuff, I don't imagine Air would still be around, or at least still be relevant, if this was all they ever made.

Air's first LP and their introduction to American shores was 1997's spectacular Moon Safari. This album is one of the few I'm willing to say is great front-to-back. The evolved lounge sound the band cultivated in Premiers Symptomes is still there, but it achieves a level of catchiness that pushes the sound into pop. "La Femme d'Argent" is in my Top 10 favorite songs regardless of genre while "New Star in the Sky" is a sign of Air's weirder tendencies to be explored in greater depth in future albums (and for us later this week).

  • Playground Love
  • Bathroom Girl
  • The Word Hurricaine
  • Dead Bodies
  • Suicide Underground

There's a whole lot of good surrounding Jeffery Eugenides's debut novel The Virgin Suicides. Aside from being an excellent work of fiction in its own right, the film adaptation served as Sofia Coppola's directorial introduction to the world just a few short years before Lost in Translation hit the Oscars. Air provided the original soundtrack for the film. "Playground Love" is still one of Air's most well-known songs. It features Gordon Tracks of Phoenix on vocals and it's probably responsible for getting a fair number of kids from my generation interested in jazz.

10,000 Hz Legend saw Air branching out considerably. On the one end they embraced almost completely organic sounds like the Beck-assisted "The Vagabond" and on the other they started to make a lot more dreamy, bizarre tracks like "People in the City". Air started as modern bit-lounge and developed into a bolt of art-pop ball lightning.

2004's Talkie Walkie is a weird wisp of an album. It's not Air's strongest, but that's not to say it isn't still a very enjoyable experience. I liken it to unusual foods like lavender ice cream. I don't want it every day and it's not what I think of when I imagine music, or even Air. But when I'm in the mood for it, Talkie Walkie hits the spot like nothing else. "Venus" and (as we'll see later this week) "Biological" are damn fine love songs while "Alpha Beta Gaga" is like alien pop music.

Air got a little lopsided critical attention for their 2007 album Pocket Symphony, if only because it's not a very cohesive record. Half the tracks seem like experiments, like "Once Upon a Time", while others are essentially somebody else's song with Air in the production booth. "One Hell of a Party" is basically a Pulp song thanks to Jarvis Cocker's indelible mark, which isn't a bad thing, it's just not Air. If it weren't for the exciting slice of electronic magic that is Love 2 I'd consider the possibility that Godin and Dunckel were running out of ideas.

Most of my abundant affection for Love 2 will have to wait for Part 2 of this Artists Condensed, if only because it's more upbeat and dancey than the soft jazz that dominated today's focus. "Sing Sang Sung" is a good peek into the sunny styles that make the album so fun, though.

 

I'll be back in a couple days to look at the other side of Air. Thanks for reading.