AIR > Love 2

Air is famous for transforming new age music people used love to hate into top-shelf kitsch hipsters love to love.

AIR

Love 2

(ASTRALWERKS)

[Rating: 4 Stars]

Air is famous for transforming new age music people used love to hate into top-shelf kitsch hipsters love to love. Love 2 marks the first recording at their very own Atlas Studio and, despite cementing a comfort zone therein for Air-like jams, this recording possesses some anomalies to the band’s usual aesthetic. For instance, the drumming, this time undertaken by an American Joey Waronker, often ticks rather speedily, thus transferring action from bedroom to dancefloor. Also novel are the guitar accoutrements, from the heavily psychedelic “Do the Joy” and “So Light is Her Footfall” to the surf-rock riff on “Be a Bee.” That the band is the ambassador of modern French pop says as much about the French as it does the millions of non-French who’ve elected them: we all like France sounding like this.