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Nicolas Godin: Concrete and Glass review – a pretty facade on shaky foundations

It’s hard to credit now how revolutionary Air’s first album, Moon Safari, sounded in 1998 – a soufflé of a record so light and fluffy it was irresistible. Nicolas Godin and Jean-Benoît Dunckel had the same retro-futurist bent as Broadcast, but they also had a sweet tooth for bubblegum to go with their gauzy electronica. The range of musical reference has broadened since then, but Concrete and Glass has a familiar wooziness about it.

Where Godin’s first record, Contrepoint, was inspired by Bach – not that you’d know – this one is the soundtrack to a series of site-specific installations paying tribute to various architects.

Again, you wouldn’t know without being told. At its blandest – and, truth be told, Air could venture beyond tastefulness into pallid – Concrete and Glass is more the soundtrack to a wine bar than some piece of Le Corbusier brutalism. Time on My Hands, featuring Kirin J Callinan singing, drifts along doing almost nothing for four and a half minutes. Ditto The Foundation (sung by Cola Boyy), only it’s a minute longer and the bass pops harder.

But Godin still has a gift for a very restrained kind of beauty. Kadhja Bonet’s vocal is perfectly suited to We Forgot Love, in which a minimalist synth pattern slowly metamorphoses with the introduction of new textures and sounds. The Border, with heavily treated vocals, casts back to Moon Safari with a melody so featherlight it might blow away at any moment.

There’s not enormous substance here, but it’s a fine amuse bouche.