This is an archived article from my now-defunct NeonReviews website. Any qualities and/or information provided about the reviewed item must be seen in context of when it was originally published.

Record company: Astralwerks / Source
Genre: Experimental / Electronic Pop
Availability: Amazon.com, Amazon.co.uk
Related links: Official website, VH1.com : Air : news and more information

This album starts off real nice and slow, and changes the pace in a good rhythm as it progresses through the entire album. All in all, a good album to sit down and listen to if you have an hour for yourself, or just want to relax (but not too much). I actually listened to this album when I had been going with about 3 hours of sleep over a period of 24 hours. Even though it’s mainly slow-paced, it really kept me awake with soothing electronic rhythms.

You’re better off listening to this CD in one sitting, but the songs are also good on their own. It’s so well put together that you get a good music experience from listening to the album from beginning to end, or even a single song for the times when you have less time to yourself.

This is more the type of music you’d want to put headphones on, crank up the volume and sit back and enjoy. You don’t really want to share, you just want the experience to yourself, if you know what I mean.

Air is a band from France, and you can clearly hear their French accents piercing through the spoken and sung words is a wonderful and strangely poetic way. The computer speech engine style heard on “How Does This Make You Feel?” is also fitting. I don’t know if they actually ran those words through a speech engine (such as Microsoft Speech), or if they ran their own voices through a whole lot of filters to make it sound that way. In any case, it’s amazing what spoken words in that way can do to the poetry of a song.

Truly an album worth having in your CD collection.

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