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| Music,
Jerry Carpenter,
20 January 1999 |
Rating: F3
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Top pop hit ‘sexy boy’ was one of most individual sounds of last year, with a stunning Mike Mills giant monkey video and a right killer baseline, which seems to have found it’s way into an ice-cream ad recently. Po-faced Gallic knob twiddlers Dunckel and Godin are back again, although it’s all old material, and not a lot of old material at that – just seven tracks, two of which have never been released before.
Opening track ‘Modular Mix’ sets the tone for most of the album. It’s very ‘drifty’, lazing along with snatches of space synths backed up with a comfortable, if unremarkable rhythm track. The next four merge pretty seamlessly together, and I found myself surprised that the track count had reached five when I’d just thought it was all one long strungout space jam.
My big problem with so much of this modern ambient scene (apart from the fact that it seem totally populated by rather contrived eccentrics) is the majority of it is soporific in the dullest sense of the word. Early classics like ‘Papa new Guinei’ by FSOL were ambient and ‘dreamy’, but imbued with a compelling emotional melodic core. There’s just enough going on in the early Air pieces to keep you interested. For all the uninteresting backbeats and overwrought reverb, there are some blissful moments when enigmatic horn melodies and ‘bzzzurrgggh’ sounding sonics kick in, and there’s a great moment in ‘Les Proffessionels’ where I’m sure I was hearing theme tune to the TV show ‘Taxi’.
The two ‘exclusive’ tracks that tail-end the CD are a bit off, ‘Californe’ is slightly too dodgy bit of electro-funk, and ‘Brakes on’ sounds like Air having a crack at a Wipeout track. So overall nice moments but nothing great here, and certainly nothing that approaches the best cuts of their second (first?) album. Take the ‘Moon Safari’ instead kids.
Virgin
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