Air - Love 2

Wed 21st Oct, 2009 in Music Reviews

It wasn’t that long ago that Air were commemorating the ten-year anniversary of their eponymous album Moon Safari. The landmark release gave the French duo a name, and saw them pioneering an electronica-pop sound that they soon came to own.

It was characterised by meticulous arrangements, washed in beautiful melodies, dreamy landscapes and an underlying soft, sexy drone. 2001’s 10,000 Hz Legend and 2004’s Talkie Walkie saw Jean-Benoit Dunckel and Nicholas Godin expanding their sound, and made them sought-after musicians, working in film (most notably writing the haunting score to the The Virgin Suicides) and composing songs for musicians like Charlotte Gainsbourg.

Following on from 2007’s Pocket Symphony, Love 2 takes Air on a further exploratory musical journey. This time their album is more personal. For the first time, it was self-produced, and recorded in their newly built Parisian music studio, Atlas. Although it still has the trademark ambience and chill of an Air album, Love 2 is more experimental. But while it lacks the immediate pop hits, it has all the subtle flourishes and intonations that make this multi-faceted pair so fascinating to listen to.

Godin and Dunckel are clearly well-educated musicians and their approach to their songs has always been precise and almost mathematical. Their most dynamic songs are often deceptively simple. At times they simply layer sounds, melodies and small lyrical phrases over one another – like the humming, ringing sounds, light vocal samples and chiming piano in the album’s first taste Do The Joy, or the tinkling keys, synthesiser melodies and crescendo buzzes that weave in and out over the steady beat of Night Hunter.

Love 2 lacks the contributors that lifted some of their previous work, and you wonder if perhaps songs like Heaven’s Light could have benefited from having the vocals of someone such as Hope Sandoval rather than Dunckel’s sweet and heavily accented, but not terribly dynamic, voice. Dunckel’s vocals do however give the sentimental and airy single Sing Sang Sung, and the breathy, haunting So Light is Her Footfall, a very French and distinctively Air touch.

When asked about the album title’s meaning, Godin said it represented a ‘second love’ – following your first love or before your third love (Love 1 and Love 3, presumably). Will Love 2 be Air fans’ second love? Perhaps not. But while it’s not one of their strongest releases, it’s still an interesting album that is unmistakably Air.

Love 2 is out now on Aircheology through EMI.