Air - Moon Safari

In the late 90's, electronic music was poised to take over the world. People were treating Prodigy's Fat of the Land like it was the Never Mind the Bullocks for a new generation. Of course it never really panned out the way people wanted, unless of course you consider the non-music of the black eyed peas to be the retarded offspring of The Crystal Method, which is a stretch no intelligent person would ever make. Anyway, in sorting through the rubble after the electronica market dipped out in the early 00's, there were only a few groups which survived and only a few albums that still sound relevant. We pretty much whittled things down to Daft Punk, Massive Attack, and Air.

Moon Safari is, if nothing else, endlessly fascinating. It mixes up bossanova and late 70's elevator music with cutting edge electronic noise. You probably know this album for its breakaway hit "Sexy Boy," which was featured in a number of things but for me will always be associated with the scene from 10 Things I Hate About You when they drop the flyers for the party down the stairwell. Oddly enough, that is probably the most aggressive song on the album. Air tends to be precisely as chill as you'd expect them to be based on the name alone. It's music that you can put on in the background and get things done to, or you can tune in and listen to the little nuances play off each other as part of a hidden complexity in the music. There's a reason why this album didn't get shoved aside along with so many of its contemporaries. Just hearing the way traditional and electronic instruments play off each other throughout the album is enough reason to own this album and listen to it on a regular basis.