Rollingstone

For Sofia Coppola's debut as a feature-film director, French instrumental dudes Air made an album that's some previously unknown form of spooky goth music for kids. The tone is set by a Bowie-tinged song of youthful love and sadness titled "Playground Love." Thereafter, gnomic music of synths and saxes and ironies burbles and bubbles along, broken up by dance beats on up-tempo moments like "Empty House" and "Dead Bodies," where Air finally resurrect their old Bacharach-esque swirl. "Bathroom Girl" luxuriates in a slowed-down Beatlehead melody; "Cemetery Party" works a lacy bunch of synth and guitar stylings atop a stark electronic stutter. "Dirty Trip" blooms and broods, rather like a tiny tribute to Seventies Pink Floyd. The album is exceedingly strange yet scrupulously crafted and intelligent. Chances are that Air, as they fashioned this fetching and jejune and weirdly disturbing score, were also having a small laugh.

James Hunter

3 STARS





NME

"Pretentious," once cooed Brian Eno - shiny-bonced pedagogue of all that is wibbly, experimental and 'difficult'- "is the most important thing we can be."

And the ambient sage had a fair point. While pretension in pop music has long been associated with noodlesome self-indulgence and ego-driven exhibitionism, Eno preferred to see it as a productive, intensely creative device; a means by which we can transgress the ordinary and truly grasp the slippery, magical potential of pop. Air's Nicholas Godin and Jean-Benoit Dunckel would doubtless agree.

Listening to the velveteen carousel of smoky jazz effects, portentous Moog rushes and sheer arsenic-laced weirdness that constitutes their soundtrack to Sofia Coppola's forthcoming The Virgin Suicides, it's clear the Gallic twosome have abandoned any spurious notion of what passes for current, state-of-the-art cool. Indeed, while 1998's 'Moon Safari' - lovely as it undoubtedly was - grappled a tad too often with the dreaded kitsch monkey, the largely instrumental '...Suicides' sounds as if it was recorded in a hermetically sealed ballroom by a group of misanthropic, jazz-obsessed weird-beards.

Yup, it's that strange. So 'Dirty Trip' and 'Ghost Song' both vibrate with the kind of shlocky atmospheric chill that courses through the finest cheapo '70s horror flicks: all creaky harpsichord flourishes and malevolent Clockwork Orange synth shrieks. 'Clouds Up', on the other hand, embraces the fidgeting analogue paranoia of Krautrock godheads Faust - a pulsating potter in space-rock's formidable tool-shed.

But '...Suicides' is no icy, Vangelis-shaped prog-scape. Its heart may be cold, but there's an endearing sense of clumsiness present - most notably in the almost childish percussive frenzy of the penultimate 'Dead Bodies' - that inevitably lends its 13 tracks a much-needed soul. Only 'Suicide Underground' slides into the soundtrackers' trap of overcompensation - its use of bombastic, vocoder-ised voices recalling the wanton ineptitude of The Rocky Horror Picture Show. But, this aside, 'The Virgin Suicides' is Godin and Dunckel at their best - entirely removed from logic and gleefully, wickedly free to roam their own, unique world.

Pretentious? Mais oui - and all the better for it too.

4 STARS