Air at Hammerstein Ballroom

Air's 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.

As the crowd 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.

Air's 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.

The instrumentals 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?