Air
Talkie Walkie

You are all "PSEUDO CONNOISSEURS"; "HALF-BAKED REVIEWERS"; I don't know what I would give to have AIR read your ramblings about their MAGNIFICENT WORK. Each album more NEW and MODERN than the last. Songs often too complicated yet highly significant, cutting-edge sounds always with an eye on the past, hermetic lyrics BUT with a strong communicative impact, perfect, meticulous, captivating arrangements, guitar, piano, keyboards played by ENGINEERS and MATHEMATICIANS, including the mastery with moogs, synthesizers, and all the other machines and astrolabes that the two geniuses from Versailles use for what they would call OUR PLEASURE. And you there, always fixated on MOON SAFARI, as if it were the only album worthy of merit and everything else should be measured by it. Moon Safari was defined as "the world seen through a champagne glass," and it was indeed true because nothing as beautiful and modern had ever been heard, but it is absurd that stupid people like you can’t understand that perhaps THAT was the MOST commercial album and that 10000Hz was a bolt out of the blue over the entire world's discography, the most beautiful future and avant-garde that no one could have ever imagined, not to mention the previous (but subsequent to Moon Safari) The Virgin Suicide, which only Coppola, daughter of ART, could understand what a sublime album it really was (and I hardly believe she ever thought "but of course, Moon Safari was more beautiful!"). I believe SHE understood that the French Air were the reference duo of the most modern electronic music. Air is to be respected, mind you, because instead of writing nonsense about them, why don’t you review your Nelly Furtado or Carmen Consoli!!! And since you always complain that the musical elaboration of the album in question is never described in detail, I reiterate the concept that ALL the Air albums have sounds that combine Moog and synthesizers from the Seventies, soft and relaxed visions (like Jean-Michel Jarre or Vangelis if you really need "references") with echoes of Italian film soundtracks from the same period, a "retro" orchestral taste in the arrangements, and a lavish use of female voices. With a wide array of acoustic instruments, these GENIUSES produce lazy rhythms and a pop with a sweet and delicious taste. And since time immemorial (I mean when math professor Dunckel, who studied classical music at the Paris conservatory and not the recorder in middle schools like you, played in an indie-pop band named Orange, and was introduced by a band member named Alex Gopher to Godin, who in the meantime had graduated in architecture), Godin’s more experimental and electronic sounds blend with Dunckel’s more classical formation, giving the decisive melodic touch. The duo from Versailles has been defined (by TRUE CONNOISSEURS and not charlatans like you) as "pure music in a gaseous state," endowed with a sparkling sound and an exceptional melodic charm. The same public of TRUE CONNOISSEURS around 2001 could witness that "small-great revolution" called 10,000 Hz Legend. The idea of another planet, full of metropolises populated by androids, is at the heart of the record. Self-ironic to the extreme, Air talk of Venusian loves and improbable situations, amidst the splendor of quadraphony and the dominance of machinery, between electronic asperities and delicate strings, tensions, and melodies. "The song form, which is at the heart of the idea of pop, continues to obsess us, but we have decided to make it more dry, direct, free of embellishments for their own sake," says Nicolas Godin. This is the case with "Electronic Performers," the album’s programmatic manifesto, which inserts guitar arpeggios on a solid rhythmic base; and "Radio #1," a choral execution with a 'vaguely kitsch' taste but intriguing to the extreme, which lives on rhythmic keyboards and ends in an unexpected percussive jubilation... People in the City is the metropolitan modernity that recalls the glories of the past without too much nostalgia, pulsing with electronics crossed by nervous spurts and then suddenly relaxed on the sound of guitars arpeggiated with malice...etc etc (I won’t bore you with praising every micro second of every magnificent track of that album). The use of technology is measured with intelligence: electronics, in fact, is interspersed with acoustic guitars and strings. "10000Hz Legend is a love letter to our machines," explains Godin - "You must love them to really know how to use them in the right way"... "Our music is dreamlike, our songs are like dreams, we want to escape reality," Jean Benoit Dunckel said at the beginning. Now it is Nicolas Godin instead who provides the measure of the new course of the Parisian duo: "We have moved from the dreamlike phase to the real one, where the outlines of things have become more precise." Returning to the duo’s last great work, TALKIE WALKIE (then what was that rambling review that I read HERE about waiting for the album release punctuated with a comment on today’s consumer society, really a bizarre rambling that I hope was the work of a sick child???)it must be said that YES, I grant you that perhaps it has been influenced by some of the producer’s choices and for this reason, the album has some "commercial" vein that certainly does not elevate it to the levels of 10000Hz Legend (note that I am talking about 10000Hz Legend and NOT Moon Safari, it makes NO SENSE to compare Air’s albums to Moon Safari anymore, I repeat, it is ANACHRONISTIC, I repeat, anyone who compares Air’s more recent works to Moon Safari is an ignorant who will never be able to understand Air’s music...And anyway, we must remember that after Moon Safari, they made 3 more albums, 4 if you count City Reading, and I would count it); but with TALKIE WALKIE we are again in front of a great work of MUSICAL AVANT-GARDE, always in their style, perhaps too difficult for you because one even said "the first listen to a record must be lightning, must give you the desire to 'stop and rewind' on the song just listened to, and not 'fast forward' while waiting to see if there will be anything better afterward". What the F...K are you saying??? 1)Even if Talkie Walkie may not have seemed like this FLASH to you, it can be lightning, maybe you haven’t heard the track RUN??!! 2)The music of the AIR is music that should be DECANTED, SIPPED like a good vintage wine, and for YOU who write those things and who may have a limited brain, maybe you would need years of decanting before you understand it. So if you really don’t have the brains nor the guts to listen to THE GENIUSES OF THE MUSIC OF 2000 called AIR, pass on to listening to other things and don’t MUMBLE on websites with those idiotic reviews. In fact, I would conclude by saying that perhaps if TALKIE WALKIE is not up to the other works, it is because, to satisfy that wide semi-ignorant public like you who link Air ONLY AND EXCLUSIVELY to Moon Safari, Air necessarily had to take a step back to make some money, yes, and to satisfy you: for them, decidedly a stretch.