After the surprising success of Moon Safari, which moved nearly a million units and is still
selling a year after hitting the shelves, the French duo Air find
themselves in the soundtrack business, distilling their stylish
pop and ambient meditations into 13 cuts that accompany Sofia
Coppola's upcoming film noir The Virgin Suicides.
Taken on its own, soundtrack music can be a furiously frustrating commodity
-- the best soundtrack music intrudes just enough into the visual
to fill out an atmosphere or set the viewer up for a surprise.
It is, by its nature, an incomplete form, half the message it
was really intended to be. Listening to it is supposed to make
you wish you could see the picture or, in its finest hour, actually
make you see it.
Having said that, of course, there's no reason to assume that Air's Nicolas
Godin and Jean-Benoît Dunckel were playing by the rules when they
assembled these low-calorie masterpieces, i.e., watch a scene
40 times, compose the music, edit like crazy, etc. One suspects
that they pretty much did what they do best anyway: find some
simple two- or three-chord phrases, dress the top with some nice
organ or synth and balance them on some shamelessly kitschy rhythm
sections. To the extent that soundtrack music isn't supposed to
sound "finished," these guys sound like they've been doing this
for years.
The gentle organ lines that intro "Bathroom Girl" sound eerily funereal until
joined by a soaring, if vaguely tense, mellotron passage (lots
of mellotron on this CD) and finally breaking into a stately '70s-era
prog anthem, a simple and direct medicine-cabinet drama. You get
the sense they are describing a scene that moves from low-grade
despair to dime-store redemption. And this kind of evolution recycles
itself throughout the soundtrack, in "Cemetary [sic] Girl" and
"The Word 'Hurricane,'" although this latter piece moves from
a drop-dead gorgeous opening passage to (evidently) a spoken piece
of the film (from which the title is borrowed) and finally ends
in a disoriented collision of synths and organs and sound effects.
Redemption here is replaced by confusion and panic.
Skip a few tracks and you come to the hypnotic "Empty House," a lazy melody
vaguely reminiscent of Ennio Morricone's spaghetti-western soundtrack themes, drifting
like a ghost over a throbbing, two-step beat and a vibe-tinged
chord pattern. This is positively the most beautiful three minutes
of music produced this year so far -- chilling, buoyant, exquisitely
wrought. We played it over and over, at least 15 times. When we're
done writing this review, we're going to play it a few more.
The CD concludes
with "Suicide Underground," which features an in-character spoken-voice
piece recounting the film's plot. It's a cold and dying thing,
the story behind this film, but the soundtrack is a warm, user-friendly,
living and breathing thing. Even the filler cuts have personality
and illustrate the band's way of marrying simplicity to retro
and suggesting, ever so gently, something of depth and subtlety
and profound grace.
David Kirby | February 22, 2000
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