Soft and fluffy
Marcus Berkmann
Either the volume knob on my CD player is broken, or pop music is going through a quiet phase. The higher reaches of the UK album charts have recently been the least noisy in human memory. After a couple of years of having our ears burnt off by The Strokes and The White Stripes, suddenly everyone is buying nice fluffy nearjazz, smooth electronica and Dido albums, not to mention Engelbert Humperdinck's Greatest Hits. What's going on? Is it a blip? Certainly, some of us would feel that loud guitars have had it their way for too long. Tinkly pianos and washes of synthesiser have been forced to watch from the sidelines, ignored and reviled. Now, it seems, their time has come, and so has Engelbert Humperdinck's. It's a strange old business, pop music, predictable only in its rampant unpredictability.
The problem with a lot of this soft and fluffy music is that it's too soft and fluffy for its own good. Take Norah Jones. For all her zillions of sales, as well as armfuls of Grammy awards, her music rarely seems to venture beyond the very, very pleasant. Like everybody else, I was seduced by her first album with its sultry, loping tunes and easy groove, and probably like everybody else I played it over and over again waiting for something else to show through. But there isn't anything else there. You turn the volume up, hoping for revelation, but all you get is the same thing a bit louder. The new album is exactly the same, with a few more power duets — to show us how far little Norah has come these past two years — and slightly duller songs, but it's very, very, very pleasant, and top of the charts everywhere in the world.
To be honest, I had been expecting more of Zero 7. Henry Binns and Sam Hardaker are a couple of studio bods from north London whose Simple Things album came from nowhere in 2001 to grab a Mercury Prize nomination and sell a million or so copies around the world. Like all such studio hods they don't sing and are never photographed, so may have two heads and/or severe dandruff, or may be someone else entirely. (Their albums don't even mention their first names, which I have just had to look up on their w-ebsite,) Binns and Hardaker come from a dance music background, and so their music tends to noodle on a bit. But in between the filler, Simple Things had some lovely sinuous soulful songs that easily transcended the whole debased 'chillout' genre. They were nicely sung, too, by a well-chosen squad of imported vocalists. When It Falls (Ultimate Dilemma) is tighter and more focused, with fewer dull instrumentals and more of an eye on the charts. But after three or four good songs the album goes to sleep for half an hour, waking up only briefly with an inventive piano coda on the last track. As with Norah Jones, these intervening tracks just float by, and you realise that you are not listening, you are doing something else. Even when I sat down with a cup of tea, determined to hear and ingest every note. I effectively came to halfway through the last track, downstairs in the kitchen doing the washing-up. To make music that has this effect is quite a knack, but they can't be doing it intentionally. Can they?
Air are the thoroughbreds of this kind of music. Talkie Walkie (Source/Virgin) is their third 'proper' album, but about the seventh they have released in one form or another, if you count soundtracks and EP collections and wacky collaborations with pseudy Italian novelists. Jean-Benoit Dunckel and Nicolas Godin are themselves tragically French, and so have had much to overcome in their brief career. But first Moon Safari (the dinner-party album of 1998/9), then the difficult, prog rock-shaded I0,000Hz Legend, and now this marvellous new album have shown their boldness, imagination and willingness to fail. On Talkie Walkie it's the novelty pop of 'Alpha Beta Gaga' that fails so comprehensively you wonder what they are playing at. But other songs evince both an instinctive grasp of texture and a serious melodic gift. While Norah Jones and Zero 7 can only refine what they do, Air are always looking to redefine what they do, which irritates everyone who would rather they just make Moon Safari over and over again. This is the way soft and fluffy music should be — soft and fluffy, with balls. Now there's a picture.
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