Air

I was reading the Wikipedia entry on Air to get a handle on the language to describe my mixed feelings about them. It says AIR to them is a French acronym meaning Love, Imagination, Dream, which is a platform I would vote for in a heartbeat and explains their appeal. The earlier albums are my favorites, especially their first Moon Safari. Just the dreamiest of dreampop. The Moog Cookbook remix of their "Kelly Watch the Stars" on the Splendour soundtrack is about the most fun three minutes of anyone's life. Basically the airier they are, the better. With each new album their sound gets progressively more mainstream and not in a good way. It's just like a band you love from another country until they start singing their songs in English and you realize just how incredibly trite they are. I found their latest, Pocket Symphony, totally wretched, as listenable as rancid raw chicken. Talkie Walkie is as far as I can go with them.

And then I saw two words in the part about their influences that explained everything to me: Pink Floyd. That's exactly it. There's a beautiful otherworldly quality to early Pink Floyd. But with both bands, the more their sound becomes of this earth, the uglier it gets. What if Pink Floyd loved people instead of hating them and had modern synthesizers - that's Air.