Air at Hammerstein Ballroom
Air’s As the crowd Air’s The instrumentals
new album, 10,000 Hz Legend, is not as clever as the first one; everybody
seems to agree about that. But as a second-rate Kraftwerk imitation it’s
an important confirmation of what Air is all about: they’re a retro act,
tinkerers with the detritus of the past and not much more; a pair of audio designers
whose stylized nostalgia creates music like furniture in a Soho boutique. It
looks good, sounds good–all style over substance. And like Beck, they have
a genius for making retro style seem avant-garde. Which is impossible, since
by definition there’s no innovation in it, but their sleight of hand is
something to marvel at.
made its way in, the p.a. system played Earth, Wind and Fire’s greatest
hits, a perfect choice to warm everybody up. It was feel-good nostalgia music
from the 70s, but not avant-garde in any way. Playing Neu! or King Crimson would
have set the wrong tone, but the pop of "Shining Star," "Boogie
Wonderland" and "Happy Feeling" was just right. I was ready to
be grooved.
first song, "Electronic Performers," was a chance for the band to
play with our expectations a little bit. It’s as confrontational as they
get, a computer-voiced manifesto that they can’t help but turn into a sad
ghost-in-the-machine story: "MIDI clock rings in my mind/Machines gave
me some freedom/Synthesizers gave me some wings… We need to use envelope filters/To
say how we feel." The message was obscured by the sound, a distinction
that shows how little there really was going on here at a conceptual level.
It’s all so very nice. Jean-Benoît Dunckel and Nicolas Godin
showed their delicate mastery of old synthesizer sounds, and in songs from first
album Moon Safari the backup musicians contributed breathy harmonies
so perfect they sounded fake.
were the real gems of the night–such ingenuity and effortless grace went
into them. No instrument replaced the vocals as a focal point, and the textures
of the music moved our ears through it all so gently that we lost track of time.
It might have been 45 seconds, it might have been four minutes. That’s
pop bliss. The most innovative thing Air did all night might have been to give
up the spotlight almost entirely to their hired bassist, Jason Falkner, who
played in Jellyfish and is now part of Beck’s circle. He stood front and
center grooving to the music that Jean-Benoît and Nicolas seemed to be
afraid to engage with themselves. And when it came time for "Playground
Love," the theme song from Air’s soundtrack to The Virgin Suicides,
Falkner did it all by himself, with spotlight and acoustic guitar and nothing
else. He introduced the song by saying, "If there are any teenagers here
tonight, this is the song for you." In fact the song was another boomer/Gen-X
nostalgia trip, a warm breeze of a ballad that flows somewhere between Fleetwood
Mac and George Harrison. How many teenagers would feel that?