Air

Jean-Benoit Dunckel and Nicolas Godin are modernists. This doesnt mean that they walk around damp Parisian streets wearing parkas and listening to the Who. Air embrace the new. Each album is a move away from the last and a journey towards something else. Their music is intellectually stimulating and empty-headedly simple; elegiac and triumphal; beyond pop and yet resolutely of it, too.

Yet Air are no academically dry intellectuals either. If their music is full of French-style clichs about boy meeting girl, its done so playfully, with a knowing wink. They know their way round a good joke and can deadpan for the Republic. Les Dawson would have been proud (and of their piano playing,...

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