Air’s new project Love 2 is a much-requested (and needed) throwback to the upbeat catchiness of 2004’s Talkie Walkie and memorable gems such as ‘Alpha Beta Gaga’ and ‘Cherry Blossom Girl.’ With their distinct atmospheric melodies, Air maintains their affectionate charm while providing an intelligent variation of stylized mood music for all listeners to enjoy. With their trademark insertion of robotic voices, angelic humming, and their overall calm electricity, Air embarks on a new journey to unearth new discoveries on what many of you May find to be an already familiar terrain. Aligned with the ‘if it ain’t broke don’t fix it’ logic, Air’s style has remained surprisingly consistent throughout all of these years. Their compositions demand your attention and reward you through nuanced harmonies crafted through an intimate combining of playful fugues of lukewarm texture. Love 2’s introduction and heavier use of electronic guitars on tracks like ‘Be a Bee,’ ‘Tropical Disease,’ and ‘Eat My Beat’ highlight the ability of Air to energize the tempo on tracks. Overall, the album is thoughtfully organized and song transitions function together in seamless and original fashion. For example, when ‘So Light is Her Footfall’ starts increasingly feeling unnecessarily drawn-out, ‘Be a Bee’ begins and reignites the album with its rocky faster-moving pace to return the listener’s interest to its sharp instrumentation.

I’m a big fan of listening to Air (or quality lounge electronica and downtempo for that matter) while writing, so working on this review is a bit of a treat. With such a fun and affectionate sound, the album creates many spheres of sound that sensate throughout the many corners of the record’s space in a refreshing burst of a forgotten innocence and imagination. The album does not dwell on a slow and intimate tempo as other albums in the Air catalogue have characteristically, but rather introduces what I call ‘key dynamic shifts’ to redirect the album’s emotional thrust when it feels most necessary. Love 2 is a pleasurable and satisfactory record, one where every track provides just what’s needed and sets the stage for a new composition to step in and carry the beats to their finale. However disconcerting at times, the songs May sound divorced from one another and uninspired, but it is important to identify that they all contain the charming simplicity we have all come to know and love of Air. Contextualizing the record is crucial to comprehending its intent, where one-liners, hooks, and catchiness of mainstream music is being stripped down into its component parts, reassembled, and represented as an expos’ to the mechanics of a passive electronica that never pretends to be more than an innocent play of novel naivet’. Clocking in at almost exactly 46 minutes, Air’s new effort reminds me of the best part of lounge electronica, it’s textual quality and ability to evoke soundscapes of never-ending bliss as an infinite playground for its listeners. This isn’t to say that the album is groundbreaking, not in the least. Though, no matter how often you listen to the record it hardly ever gets boring, and is still rewarding in its ability to entertain, relax, and provide valuable reflection time, which in this day and age, is tough to come by.

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