Truthfully it's been some time since Air's Nicolas Godin and Jean-Benoît Dunkel could truthfully be said to be pop musicians, but their fourth album Pocket Symphony journeys further from the pop firmament than ever before. Slow, stately songs built around the tick of electronic drums, the trill of vintage synthesisers, and somewhat unexpectedly, some traditional Japanese instruments - the koto, a Japanese floor harp, and the banjo-like shamisen - it's an album apparently more concerned with texture and mood than crafting catchy pop fromage. Certainly, it often does it well: 'Mayfair Song' locks into a dazed, lightly cosmic groove oddly reminiscent of Talk Talk circa Spirit Of Eden, all purposeful piano and moody, drifting bass, while the blissful 'Photograph' sees angelic vocals submerged within a tide of shimmering strings and trilling chimes. For the most part, vocals are fairly sparse, but there are two guest spots: the first from Jarvis Cocker, who murmurs like Scott Walker with a sore head through 'Hell Of A Party', and the second from The Divine Comedy's Neil Hannon, who invests 'Somewhere Between Waking And Sleeping' with an impressive melancholy soul. At first, it sounds slight, but carry Pocket Symphony with you, and feel it slowly work its magic. --Louis Pattison
Air
Pocket Symphony
[Astralwerks; 2007]
Rating: 6.6
Air like to let you know what kind of album you're in for with the first couple of bars of their opening tracks. Moon Safari faded up with bongos on "La Femme D'Argent", setting the stage for a loose and hep journey into space-age atmospherics. The "do-do-thWACK" S&M whip of the drum machine opening to "Electronic Performers", on the other hand, thrust us into the stiffer, shinier, more adventurous world of 10,000 Hz Legend, wherein Nicolas Godin and Jean-Benoît Dunckel sounded as if they'd been inhaling some of Dean and Gene Ween's Scotchgard. Talkie Walkie broke the percussion-only trend by pairing its opening beat with a strummed acoustic guitar and a stately piano refrain, introducing their warmest, brightest, and most song-oriented album. And on Pocket Symphony, the opening message is equally clear: The fluttering percussion on "Space Maker", hovering all alone, sounds like it's bouncing off hard, cold surfaces. Which would seem to suggest that this will be Air's quietest and most austere offering.
And so it is. There's a remarkable confidence on display here, that Air would choose to have their first album in three years be so spacious and moody, and so much less pop. They must know that they'll lose a few come-lately fans with music this relaxed and, well, sleepy. But the more you listen to Pocket Symphony, the more it becomes clear that it's remote by design. As they demonstrated throughout Talkie Walkie and on a few tracks per record on the previous two, Air can very capably write terrifically catchy songs when so inclined; here, they'd rather create finely-wrought furniture music. And they're good at it. Working again with Nigel Godrich, they've crafted what might be one of the year's best-sounding records, every lone piano note hanging improbably long in space and aloud to decay in what must be some unimaginably beautiful room.
My first instinct was that Pocket Symphony was the return to Moon Safari territory fans wanted so desperately when 10,000 Hz Legend first hit the shelves, but upon returning to their debut for the first time in a good while, that seems off. Yes, there's a quality to Godin's heavenly basslines that occasionally puts this record in a similar groovy headspace, but Air are light years from the earlier work's cheeky retro-futurisms. In the formal world of Pocket Symphony, a squelchy Moog would be considered vulgar, the unpredictability of its aged circuits no substitute for the absolute control of a grand piano, a finely brushed acoustic guitar, or the Japanese koto. Air are ready to unplug here at a moment's notice, and the space in which these acoustic instruments was recorded counts as an instrument in itself.
Four of these dozen tracks are purely instrumental, but the ratio feels higher-- many of the poppier songs seem to be about arrangement and shading first. Jarvis Cocker chips in on "One Hell of a Party", his husky, downcast voice suiting the song's metaphor (relationship as hedonistic soiree to be reckoned with the morning after), and yet the frame of the song is so skeletal that the sentiment never gathers weight. This might seem to mirror the bombed-out nature of the lyric, but that's an intellectualization; it's ultimately just an OK, verging-on-dull song. Neil Hannon of the Divine Comedy sings lead on "Somewhere Between Walking and Sleeping" and the result-- muted, vaguely bland-- is again just serviceable.
The pop songs that Dunckel sings are better suited to the album's frame of mind, serving more as sketches, the sort of half-written catchphrases that exist, in the "Kelly Watch the Stars" sense, mostly to build a chord structure around. The creamy layers of voice during the "without you" chorus in "Left Bank", along with the upbeat "Mer du Japon"-- one of the best songs they've written and the album's best track-- are as close as Air get to Talkie Walkie-level hooks. Elsewhere, it's more subtle hints and raised eyebrows than fleshed-out songs, whether the prickly synth and robotic swing of "Napalm Love" with its three-note melody or the crisp, lightly echoed spaciousness of "Photograph", which clicks along like patent leather boots down a dark marble hallway.
On every pass through the record, it seems clearer that the sound of Pocket Symphony is the album's real content. And that sound, no question, is exquisite. But it's also hard to hold in your head after the record stops playing, so Pocket Symphony winds up feeling strangely transient, accomplished and genuinely likeable but also forgettable.
-Mark Richardson, March 07, 2007
Review by Heather Phares
Ever since Moon Safari was hailed as an instant classic, Air has swung back and forth between the experimental and accessible sides that Nicolas Godin and Jean-Benoît Dunckel united so perfectly on their debut. 10,000 Hz Legend might have been too grandiose and aggressively experimental for some Air fans, but Talkie Walkie sometimes felt as if the duo was presenting the most widely palatable version of their music possible. On Pocket Symphony, Dunckel and Godin find a balance between pretty and inventive that they haven't struck since, well, Moon Safari, even though it isn't nearly as immediate -- even by Air's standards, this is an extremely introspective and atmospheric album. It's beyond clichéd to call the duo's music filmic; nevertheless, "Space Maker" and "Night Sight" play like the album's opening titles and ending credits, bracketing a set of songs that are sadder and wiser than anything Air has done since The Virgin Suicides (particularly "Lost Message," which could have easily appeared on that soundtrack). Made around the same time Dunckel and Godin were working with Jarvis Cocker and Neil Hannon (who also appear here) on Charlotte Gainsbourg's 5:55 and Dunckel was recording his solo project Darkel, Pocket Symphony could be seen as part of a loose trilogy; if so, it's more in line with 5:55's moody romanticism than Darkel's hyper-pop (where, apparently, any lighter-hearted tracks along the lines of Talkie Walkie's "Alpha Beta Gaga" or "Surfing on a Rocket" ended up).
However, Pocket Symphony doesn't feel as serenely untouchable as some of Air's previous work, and these darker cracks and wrinkles give it character. These songs are often unsettling, but gently so, like dreams that are still vivid but hard to explain upon waking. The Neil Hannon-sung "Somewhere Between Waking and Sleeping" is the most obvious example of Pocket Symphony's fever dream atmosphere, but there are plenty of others: "Photograph," a quintessentially sensuous Air track, gives the impression of something a little sinister occurring just out of frame; "Redhead Girl" is a lush meditation on unrequited love so paralyzing that time itself stops. The entire album deals with toxic love and its fallout, but Dunckel and Godin alternate between romanticizing heartbreak and showing just how dreary it can be -- although, skilled mood-makers that they are, they manage to make dreary sound pretty romantic, too. The deceptively delicate single "Once Upon a Time" darkens its fairy tale imagery with the fact that once upon a time might be never, while the outstanding "One Hell of a Party," which features Jarvis Cocker on vocals, presents a breakup as a hangover (a sentiment Cocker also explored brilliantly on Pulp's This Is Hardcore).
Pocket Symphony pairs Air with producer Nigel Godrich, which is an inspired choice -- not just because Godrich has a similarly atmospheric touch and adds lots of fascinating sonic details, but because he helps Air keep the album intimate, not polished into a state of distant perfection. "Left Bank," which blends humming with a cello and captures Godin's acoustic guitar so clearly it sounds like he's strumming it behind you, is a gorgeous example of how well this collaboration works. The Japanese influence on Talkie Walkie and Air's music for Lost in Translation is deepened on Pocket Symphony, with shamisen and koto (which Godin spent a year learning to play) adding to its ethereal beauty, particularly on "Mer du Japon." Musically and thematically, this is some of Air's most elegant, mature music; it does what it does so compellingly that any attempts to be "poppy" would miss the point.
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