AIR

   "VIRGIN SUICIDES" 
(Astralwerks, 2000)

 Tracks:
1. Playground Love 3:32 , 2. Clouds Up 1:28 , 3. Bathroom Girl 2:24 , 4. Cemetery Party 2:35 ,
5. Dark Messages 2:28 , 6. The Word 'Hurricane' 2:31 , 7. Dirty Trip 6:11 , 8. Highschool Lover 2:41,
9. Afternoon Sister 2:23 , 10. Ghost Song 2:14 ,11. Empty House 2:36 ,12. Dead Bodies 2:56
13. Suicides Underground 5:31

  Line Up:
Nicolas Godin - guitars, bass guitars, keyboards , Jean-Benoit Dunckel - keyboards

  Guest:
Gordon Tracks - vocals on 1 , Hugo Ferran - Saxophone on 1 , Brian Reitzell - Drums on 3, 6, 7, 12, 13

Air is a French duet, one of the bands that, without really making progressive rock, it gets used to point out as heirs of the progressive one and the electronics (something that happens also with Radiohead, Sigur Ros, Mercury Rev, etc). People like Gayle Ellett (Djam Karet) or Steve Wilson (Porcupine Tree), they have already eulogized the music of Air in numerous occasions. 
Up to now so alone I had listened the first album of the group, the excellent one “Moon Safari”. In that album Air practices kind of a tecno-pop electronic and symphonic relaxed, very sophisticated and elegant, with a very personal sound. The album that occupies us, “Virgin”, it is not the typical album in conventional study. It is a sound band of the equal movie I title, and a work very different to their premiere. But surprisingly with “Virgin”, Air enters of full in the universe of the progressive and symphonic rock of which we are in charge of in LCDM. And that way enters, “Virgin” it is an exquisite album, a delight for the hearings but fine and delicate of the progressive world. 
It is curious but this album reminds me (according to the fragment), in a very special way to some artists and progressive works. Concretely Morte Macabre disk that contains numerous versions of classic topics of terror movies, the “Echoes” of Pink Floyd, the “Lord of the Rings” of Bo Hansson, the group Goblin and their sound bands of Italian terror movies, the topic instrumental call “Repent Walpurgis” that closed Procol Harum's first album, and the “Snow Goose” of Camel. 
Mellotrons, synthesizers, organs, etc, the whole arsenal of typical keyboards of the progressive rock is given appointment in this conceptual work. Alone it is necessary to listen the mellotron that begins the first topic “Playground Love” (the only one sung of the disk) that is taken out of the “Starless” of King Crimson, to realize that we are before a disk completely been worth for symphonic hearings. 
The rest of the disk lapses with the same effectiveness that the beginning, with the help of instrumental short topics that form an unit. Where they don't also lack passages but environmental, soft rhythms of pop symphonic and space rock. 
The fans of the symphonic but pleasant and atmospheric, you don't get lost this excellent disk for that I am for sure you loved it to most.

Ferran Lizana
rockomic@vodafone.es