On the Road Again
Live Reviews:

Air
October 20, 1998
Lee's Palace, Toronto, ON

The lights at Lee's Palace go down, and the capacity crowd is still, looking as one to the stage as it stares back at them with two large banners depicting feminine eyes. A lone figure appears to a smattering of applause. The figure, dressed in white and sporting an unkempt hairdo, takes its place behind a keyboard and plays the theme from "Close Encounters of the Third Kind." As the final note rings out, two more white-clad figures emerge, one taking its place behind another bank of synthesizers, the other behind a drum kit. More applause. Finally, two more figures appear and sit behind keyboards at stage front. Though smaller than the other figures, they receive the lion's share of applause. One of them begins to play a tame, soothing melody on an electric piano. The crowd goes wild.

At this point, two things should be noted: the scene takes place in 1998, not in 1976, and these Men in White are not the bastard children of the Glad Garbage Man: they are the touring incarnation of Air, spearheads of the French nouvelle vague of retro-futurisme. Determined to take their fans back to a future that never was, the duo of former architect Nicolas Godin and former schoolteacher Jean-Benoît Dunckel have pulled out all the stops, cramming twelve keyboards on stage and talking to the audience through a vocoder. Toronto audiences haven't seen anything quite like this since Neil Young went through his Transformer Man phase, prancing around the stage wearing a skinny tie and a headset mike that made him sound like a subway announcement on helium.

Of course, Air have an affable chic that Neil would eschew. This 'je ne sais quoi' has taken them far indeed. They're consummate craftsmen who aren't afraid to mess around with their songs: live, "Kelly Watch the Stars" begins with an electro-disco rhythm and gradually metamorphoses into a feverish rock-out as Nicolas forgoes his synth for an electric guitar. "Sexy Boy" owes a lot to Beck's "Sex Kino" mix with its slinky stops and starts and funk bass. Even the calmer songs often work themselves up to a slow burn, and a surprisingly punky new song called "B.O.B." brings to mind latter-day Joy Division.

It may be strange to compare the visceral rock of New Order's precursor to the polished sheen provided by two non-depressed Frenchmen, but in a way the comparison's not so far-fetched. Both groups achieve a kind of musical purity, where there appears to be no distance between intention and execution in their songs. While Joy Division transcended post-punk, exposing their vulnerable core through harsh austerity, Air move beyond the confines of '70s proto-techno through their very perfectionism: not a note feels out of place, and a dreamy melancholy pervades the whole. It's like looking through old boxes and finding a remote-control robot that still works. Here at the end of the millennium, we may not be colonizing planets or taking space buses to the moon. We may not even be uniformly beautiful, but it doesn't hurt to wonder what might have been. As Mark Burgess of the Chameleons once sang, "If this is the stuff dreams are made of, no wonder I feel like I'm floating on air..."