RFI Musique - - Album review

Album review

Air

Love 2

Paris

22/10/2009 -

Veteran French electro duo Air float freer than their oxygen-light name on Love 2, a down-tempo chill of an album full of reverential seventies references.

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For the first time in their career, Jean-Benoît Dunckel and Nicolas Godin opted for total musical autarky, shutting themselves away in their hi-tech studio in north-east Paris for twelve months to work on their fifth album. Gone are producer Nigel Godrich and the other prestigious guest stars that graced the duo's previous album, Pocket Symphony (2007). Apart from drummer Joey Waronker who came into the studio to record for a couple of days, Dunckel and Godin evolved in splendid isolation, improvising alone on their retro synthesisers, vintage vocoders and other assorted gadgets.

Whilst Love 2 is instantly recognisable as an Air release, Dunckel and Godin serve up an eclectic mix of tracks this time round, recounting a wordless love affair through loops, chord progression and melody (Love), playing with English vocal puns on Eat My Beat or weaving strings and saxophone around African influences (African Velvet). But if one unifying thread runs throughout this album it is the ambient-masters' shared passion for the great film soundtracks of the 1970s and their admiration for the work of Jean-Claude Vannier, Lalo Schifrin and Ennio Morricone.

Leaving the lunar chill of their debut album Moon Safari far behind, our electro cosmonauts venture into new musical galaxies on Love 2, radiating warmth and positive vibes via fat basslines, languid vocals and the occasional flute. Dunckel and Godin certainly let their hair down in their new studio, but their "let's-fool-around-and-see-what-happens" antics do not always work. Sing Sang Sung sounds a little hollow to our liking, Tropical Disease a little too kitsch and the influence of Moby shines a little too obviously on Heaven’s Light, leaving us shaken but not totally stirred by Air's latest musical cocktail.