Air - Twentyears

Pitchfork 56

For many years, Air’s clever hybrid of downbeat electronic, 1960s pop, and Gallic kitsch served as a gateway to undiscovered worlds of cool. They brought their cachet to artists long out of fashion: the leather-voiced Serge Gainsbourg, the antic electronic experimenters Perrey and Kingsley, the easy-listening maestro Burt Bacharach, the mellifluous synth wizard Tomita. Long before yacht-rock made lite acceptable, Air spun effortless good taste into a form as frothy, weightless, and melt-on-your-tongue easy to consume as meringue.

However, Nicolas Godin and Jean-Benoît Dunckel are more than just hip foreign exchange students who lived with you in high school and left behind a bunch of really cool CD-Rs. Over the course of their two-decade career, the French duo expanded their dandelion-tuft pop sound across nine albums—among them groundbreaking film scores, Italian spoken-word collaborations, and, last year, a vinyl-only soundtrack to a museum exhibition. Still, in 2016, does anyone need a greatest-hits release from them—especially when you can sequence your favorites on the streaming services that have now replaced them as gateways to the obscure?

Even for those who answer “yes,” it's doubtful that Twentyears, the French duo’s first best-of and rarities collection, will be the one to satisfy. Diehard fans and more unfamiliar listeners alike will likely find its tracklist obvious, as it draws heavily from the band’s early material; if you really wanted to hear half of their debut, Moon Safari, wouldn’t you just listen to it? The best-of disc includes five songs from Talkie Walkie, two from 10,000 Hz Legend, and then just one apiece from The Virgin Suicides, Pocket Symphony, and Le Voyage Dans la Lune. Consider this: 13 of the best-of disc’s 17 selections appear in Apple Music’s ranking of the duo's most popular songs.

The first eight tracks on the disc include “La Femme D'Argent,” “Cherry Blossom Girl,” “Playground Love,” and “Sexy Boy”—songs you've probably heard so many times, you scarcely even register them as they’re playing. The first half of the disc lulls you into such a stupor of viscous strings, vibraphone, soft-porn jazz flute, and similarly syrupy ingredients, poured on in motions as familiar as your own bleary-eyed matinal rituals, that you barely even notice when track nine, “Moon Fever”—from 2012’s Le Voyage Dans la Lune, and probably the first song here you haven’t heard more times than you can count—cuts through the daze with its otherworldly, breathtakingly spooky beauty.

But then that's followed by back-to-back songs from 10,000 Hz Legend—the mouth harp and motorik chug of “Don't Be Light” (Air does Suicide, essentially), followed by the gossamer gospel of “How Does It Make You Feel” (Air does Spiritualized?)—and you’re reminded that you’re listening to a playlist, not an album. “Once Upon a Time,” Pocket Symphony’s piano-driven echo of Stereolab, is a lovely tune. Then there are some more songs from Talkie Walkie and Moon Safari, just in case you'd forgotten those albums exist. Only by the penultimate track are we treated to a non-LP cut, “Le Soleil Est Près de Moi,” a slow drip of narcotic R&B that harkens back to their early connections to Mo Wax.

As for the rarities disc, three of its songs were already released on the Moon Safari tenth anniversary edition in 2008. Two more come from 2009's Love 2—a release that doesn’t figure at all into the best-of disc—while another is from Love 2’s Japanese edition. (That one’s called “Indian Summer”—do you even need me to tell you it’s got a sitar in it?) “High Point” is just an instrumental version of “Once Upon a Time.” Fortunately, there are a few nice surprises, even if six of the “rarities” are songs fans have heard before. The Pocket Symphony bonus cut “The Duelist,” a breathy, Bowie-referencing duet between Charlotte Gainsbourg and Jarvis Cocker, is great, with a quirky melodic drift that wouldn’t sound out of place on one of Cate Le Bon’s albums. The previously unreleased “Adis Abebah,” from the soundtrack to 2010’s Quartier Lointain, folds Ethio-jazz saxophones into Air’s velvety downbeat, to winsome effect. And the hushed, deadpan “The Way You Look Tonight” plays to their strengths as masters of style over substance: “I like the way you look tonight/No blood in your vein, what does it mean/Trashy art everywhere, on the screen/Slow-motion aftertaste, and love at first sight.” It’s seductive and ridiculous all at once.

But that's the rare instance on Twentyears where the band's ambitions are given their due. Where are the odd, wonky pop songs like “Missing the Light of the Day,” from Love 2? Or the bristling electronic textures of 10,000 Hz Legend? They hint at a more exciting compilation that might have been by including “Land Me,” a gorgeous, meditative sketch off last year’s unexpected Music for Museum, a minimalist ambient soundtrack for an art exhibition? Why not include more of that? Or, instead of a superfluous best-of collection, why not reissue the vinyl-only Music for Museum, which is currently selling for $130 and up on Discogs? Air have never been the most adventurous of bands, but as Music for Museum proved, they’re not afraid to experiment.

Ultimately, the picture that emerges on Twentyears is a simplified version of Air that swaps out most of their quirks for only their most palatable qualities. It’s a lite version of the band, and a frustrating missed opportunity.