Yahoo! Music Review

Released on 12/03/07
Label: Virgin

If you are one of the thousands who bid a regretful farewell to Air in 2001, around the time of bombastic curio "10,000 Hz Legend", and have since been casting regular wistful glances at their chipped and smeary copies of influential 1998 debut "Moon Safari", it could be time to crack open the absinthe again. The French duo's fifth album has the shimmering thumbprints of producer and purveyor of the sublime Nigel Godrich all over it. It is beautiful, uplifting stuff. Nicolas Godin and Jean-Benoît Dunkel may have grown older, and wiser, but they haven't grown sour.

All "Moon Safari"'s melodic indolence is here - strummed acoustic guitars amble over subtle synths, tinkling percussion and nodding bass lines. Notes hang in the air like polished icicles. Lyrics are breathy, multi-tracked and harmonised, and muse prettily over elusive lovers ("the angels fight over your photograph") and the passage of time ("when the redhead girl goes by, the course of time stands still"). New for 2007 - and perhaps leading on from predecessor "Talkie Walkie"'s "Alone In Kyoto") - are a clutch of traditional Japanese string instruments such as the koto (a harp) and shamisen (a banjo) and appearances from ubiquitous Francophiles Jarvis Cocker and Neil Hannon.

Just one long ambient swoosh, then? Not a bit of it. Bookended by dreamy instrumentals (with strings arranged and conducted by the none-more-soundtrackish Joby Talbot), "Pocket Symphony"'s cuts are as distinctive as patterned patchwork squares (albeit all made from mint green silk). "Once Upon A Time"'s Brad Mehldau-like piano and a girly-sounding Dunckel combine to create an artsy fairy tale. Jarvis sighs and groans his way through his own world-weary lyrics for post-relationship ballad "One Hell Of A Party", while "Napalm Love"'s repetitive, buzzing, confoundingly hypnotic groove wraps a thick quilt around the listener's head in the manner of a slightly sinister seducer.

The finger-picked guitar of "Left Bank" certainly borrows from Jose Gonzalez, while the thrusting disco of the tremendous "Mer Du Japon" recalls the wind-in-the-hair blast that was its makers own genre-defining "Sexy Boy". The affecting "Somewhere Between Waking And Sleeping" has Neil Hannon living out a soft-focus, Pink Floyd-esque psych fantasy. "Moon Safari Part Two", then? Well, not quite. There's something austere and controlled about this 12-track exercise in Gallic cool that makes the saucy retro-futurism of a (near) decade ago seem a long way away.

Stylish, ephemeral and inscrutable - long may the Godfathers of French ambience pout.

    by Anna Britten