Music Review: Air - Pocket Symphony
Air has always been fantastic at making seamless art- a soundtrack for our waking life, and a concert for our sleeping one. Of course, this has always made them a target for scoring films (Sofia Coppola seems particularly obsessed with them, employing their help on both Virgin Suicides and Lost in Translation). But when it comes to their album work, they have a tendency to get lost in the (no pun intended) airiness of their sound. All this changed when Talkie Walkie hit the shelves in 2005. They used their usual amount of insane production, but they focused their concerns on the ultimate end product of the songs. This led to tracks like “Surfing on a Rocket” and “Cherry Blossom Girl” becoming as close to radio hits as they could manage.
If Talkie Walkie was their finest pop iteration, consider Pocket Symphony somewhere between that and their film music. The record begins particularly well- second track, the piano-drenched “Once Upon a Time,” could be their most gorgeous pitch-shifted vocal performance to date. After that, Jarvis Cocker makes a strong guest vocal appearance on the Japanese Koto experiment “One Hell of a Party.” Other exceptional tracks include the smooth guitar turnarounds in “Left Bank” and the sunlit interlude “Mer Du Jupon.”
