Love 2: Bear-Salmon Kaleidoscopic Music

An Air album is something else. No matter what album or what situation- the listener will undoubtedly be chilled out. If you just got told by your slick-haired boss to cancel your barbecue plans because he wants you to do some work he hasn’t finished over the weekend or if you were just cut off by a driver talking on their cell phone after waiting in line at a post office for thirty minutes because someone needed to complain about stamp prices or if your health insurance just denied your claim to pay for the ankle you sprained while stepping over the line at the bowling lane, thus losing the championship by 3 pins then you should probably pick up the whole Air catalog. No matter the album or the situation, you will end up lying in some grass looking up at clouds and thinking they all look like teddy bears or large breasts.

Love 2, their latest album, is no different. While writing these words, I’ve already dozed off twice and dreamed of parachuting into piles of rice pudding. I was listening to the album on my way home from the rodeo the other night and I sat, with my foot on the brake, through 3 green lights until I realized my turn signal wasn’t part of the song. The two Frenchmen have been doing this to me for eleven years now.

I’ve never been able to listen to trance music, but nonetheless, I like to be entranced. So when a pop band can figure out a way to divert the repetitive and robotic nature of the genre, I will dance from the knees down while seated. I will enjoy endlessly this music I call, for lack of inventiveness, trance-pop -or for over-inventiveness, cherry-flavored hypno-gravy. Love 2 is like a kaleidoscope, but instead of looking at little pieces of colored cellophane when you peer through the little hole you are looking at lots of bears standing atop waterfalls catching salmon in their mouths as they leap out of the rushing water. Air is bear-salmon kaleidoscopic music.

I just drank a fourth serving of coffee and I feel like I need more. I went to bed at 9:30 last night despite Monday Night Football excitingly being on mute while I ate spicy thai food. I started taking bubble baths instead of showers in the morning. I’m thinking about seeing a Sandra Bullock movie. My mile split-times on jogs are around 47 minutes. I keep being tranquilized and the only real reason I can think of is that I keep listening to Love 2. It’s great. I would recommend this album to everyone I know, but productivity would drop world wide and next thing you know, the government would be issuing some sort of trance-pop bailout and Americans would be blaming the French for something else. “Your music is so dang chilled out! How can we be expected to sell stuff with this cherry-flavored hypno-gravy clogging our blood vessels!?” It might even escalate into war, except everyone would be so relaxed from listening to Air that they would just lay down in some grass and look up at the clouds.

I may be exaggerating the effect of the album a little bit. I may even be lying. However, that’s what makes music such a blissful bubble-bath inducing beauty. People use words to describe it, when really they should be using dance moves- and everyone speaks their own language when they speak in dance-move. I personally described Love 2 with a wavy, tight-lipped head nod move while my friend described it with a one-shouldered shrug-like move and my crazy neighbor used a fingers-are-snakes, full-bodied, closed-eyed falling off a cliff move. We were all saying the same thing, but didn’t really know what each other was saying.

Check out this video to Sing Sang Sung:

WATCH:: Air - "Sing Sang Sung" - Watch more Videos at Vodpod.