Thursday, January 29, 2004
Copyright © Las Vegas Mercury

Listening Station

Air

Talkie Walkie

To understand the dynamics of French duo Air's music, one should view Sofia Coppola's latest film, Lost in Translation, which features the band's "Alone in Kyoto." Almost all the music for that work--including "Kyoto," complete with measured, East Asia-evoking guitar pluckings and keyboard peckings--is midtempo and subtle with the chord changes, which somehow brilliantly juxtaposes Tokyo's bustling and disorienting climate to a lulling effect.

Air's music also works in the other direction. The cosmic, almost psychedelic feel of its mostly ambient output has, remarkably, always exuded an urban atmosphere--though not by reflecting it, a la its fellow Frenchmen in Daft Punk or English trip-hop act Portishead. Rather, the duo deflects it as if protecting its listener from any aberrant energy or distracting ephemera. Its third studio album, Talkie Walkie, accomplishes this marvelously. Where a record this subdued should put anyone stuck in a traffic jam to sleep, it actually inspires a new level of consciousness--without the drugs.

It is the closest Air has come to re-creating the languid house of 1998's Moon Safari, considered a landmark electronic music recording. Its work on Coppola's The Virgin Suicides felt specific to that project, and 2001's 10,000 Hz Legend was too complex for its own good. With Talkie, Nicolas Godlin and JB Dunckel have found a happy medium between the experimental and the emotional, thanks to frequent use of vocals, usually their own, and the acoustic guitar. These elements reduce the haze level found on some of their previous recordings, resulting in a more focused--though not less transcendent--work.

The best example of this is "Cherry Blossom Girl," arguably the best song on the album. The electronic components don't try to overpower the effeminate vocal harmonies or the guitars, but they do fill in the empty spaces enough to make an impression; it's a more accomplished version of the electro-folk Madonna incorporated into her last few albums. "Cherry" is an assured work you easily sink into, but it's also utterly transporting, even in the most erratic of settings. That phenomenon might normally lose its listener, but with a band as seasoned as Air, that dynamic works beautifully, once again setting it apart from imitators peers alike.--Mike Prevatt

Mochipet

Combat

Even if mankind could somehow surmount the tyrannical dictates of gravity, thermodynamics and the PATRIOT Act, there would remain a certain number of physical impossibilities that human beings could never overcome. For example, it would still be impossible to eat hard-shell tacos while running a marathon. Likewise, there would be no feasible way that a person could watch a Billy Crystal film without wondering how Crystal became a successful actor in the first place. And clearly, combining Johnny Cash's "I Won't Back Down" with the inimitable rhymes of the Cash Money Millionaires would remain absolutely out of the question.

Or at least it would for everyone but David Wang (a.k.a. Mochipet), whose intriguing full-length debut Combat samples everything from Wang Chung to Captain Beefheart and then pairs the samplees into sonic duels with similarly named adversaries (e.g., "Wang Chung vs. The Real Wang" and "Captain Beefheart vs. Captain & Tenille"). While in theory, this is a wonderful idea--who among us hasn't longed for an enterprising audiophile to pit Barry White against the White Stripes and White Lion?--the majority of Mochipet's mixes sound like the impetuous creations of an infant flip-flopping between radio stations. Perhaps the only true exception is "Aphex Twin vs. Thompson Twins," which blends a laid-back lounge version of Aphex Twin's "Come to Daddy" with the best of the Thompson Twins' '80s singles.

The rest of Combat, however, is little more than electronic masturbation--a self-indulgent voyage to the outer limits of digital manipulation (no pun intended). Bogged down by inexplicable breakbeats and hyperspeed drums, the remaining 11 tracks quickly lose their kitsch appeal as the comfortable familiarity of the samples gives way to the unsettling polarity of the finished products. And worst of all, Mochipet fails to deliver on the promise of "ThunderCats vs. The Stray Cats," instead offering up 30 seconds of indecipherable noise. Some things are just too good to be true.--Newt Briggs

Clearlake

Cedars

One of the easier justifications for online file-sharing of copyrighted music has been that the recording industry's albums rarely have appeal beyond the first single. This is a valid complaint, but it doesn't just work for the Big Five's output--indie rock has its filler-heavy clunkers, too, and Clearlake's Cedars is one of them.

This English quartet is not lacking for potential, that's for sure. Its songs are hardly cookie-cutter, and the musicianship is neither sloppy nor heavily treated. Furthermore, leadoff track "Almost the Same"--the album's bait, as it were--is a strong, propulsive single that, despite recalling A Flock of Seagulls and most of the second-string Britpop bands of the mid-'90s, makes singer Jason Pegg's lyrical misery sound rather exhilarating.

As soon as the second song--a baroque goth-rock tune called "The Mind Is Evil"--kicks in, you wonder what happened to the momentum of the previous track, and you slowly discover that it's never coming back. Melodies don't stick, rhythms rarely intoxicate and arrangements can grow awfully esoteric. Worse, Pegg cannot properly trigger his wide-ranging vocals to elevate the band's midtempo art rock; there's little palpable conviction or urgency in either his singing or his lyrics. "What's wrong with being weak?" he asks in "It's All Too Much," and if you get that far into Cedars, you've probably heard all too much.--Mike Prevatt