Air Ooze Sex Appeal at Avalon

A great deal of music is made about sex—arguably all music is about it on some level. And yet most of this is pandering, descriptive and in a few cases instructive. Very little of it is actually sexy.

In French electronic duo Air, who played Avalon on Monday, we find something truly sexy—a band broad enough to encompass the sadness and the ecstasy of it all. They are smart enough to realize that sex is as much about anticipation as stimulation, that it involves not only the heat of the act itself but also the chill of waking up to find yourself alone in the morning. They show why Britney and Christina, for all their gyrating, are still just Mouseketeers.

And yet I will admit to being skeptical as to how they would translate this into a live show. A concert is, after all, not an art exhibit—it is not enough to be quietly evocative. In a certain sense, a concert must be sex itself, drawing us all into the passion of artistic creation. How would Air turn their very intelligent brand of make-out music into something ecstatic and visceral?

The answer, obviously, is with teeth-rattling, trouser-flapping, hip-shaking percussion. From the outset of the show, Air’s intentions were clear. “Venus,” which on Air’s most recent album Talkie Walkie is a stately, composed piano march, became something propulsive, swelling in emotion, building in intensity, rhythmically thrusting until…well, let’s not get carried away here.

Right on its heels, “Alpha Beta Gaga,” which on Talkie Walkie is a whimsical, whistling meander, became a driving, raving onslaught, riding on a crunching, insistent bass line that Bill Wyman would not have disowned.

The band itself made no secret of its aim.

Between songs, Jean-Benoît Dunckel, in halting English, informed the crowd, “I like to think about what I am going to do in bed, especially whether it is going to be with a man or with a woman. Everything we do is related to the world of sex.”

This of course drew loud approbation from the audience, especially the women, and might lead one to wonder whether Frenchmen can get away with anything.

Bisexuality was one of many balances Air struck on Monday. Theirs is a sound as much about empty space as solid ground, as much about the notes being played as the silence outside. Even the band was evenly divided between the two Frenchmen and their two American backup musicians. Perhaps University President Lawrence H. Summers should have talked to these guys for his “Renewing the Atlantic Partnership” project.

The most apparent balance was between synthetic and organic. On one end of the stage stood Nicolas Godin, alone with his acoustic guitar. On the other stood Dunckel, ensconced in a veritable cocoon of keyboards and synthesizers.

Of course nobody, not even Air, plays with this technological contrast without inviting comparison to Radiohead. On a gorgeously schizophrenic rendition of “People in the City,” Dunckel and Godin got in touch with their inner paranoid android, swinging wildly between rock stomp and tropical synth. But I suspect that their android is just suffering from a mild case of ennui, because Air is having way too much sex to endorse Radiohead’s apocalyptic prolepsis.

The interplay of synthesizer and guitar is one of the keys to Air’s sound, but also one of its chief dangers, as this interplay is also the key to most elevator music.

It would be easy to write Air off as an easy listening duo—Robert Christgau once wrote of the band that he “remembers when easy listening was worth hating”—and it would seem that the duo themselves are not exempt from making this mistake. The line between ironic kitsch and muzack can be a thin one, and at times on Monday Air began to sound more like intermission than the feature presentation.

It was hard not to hear Monday’s concert as a continuous flow of shifting dynamics, riding fluidly from Bacharach piano chords to euphorically stumbling keyboards to tense atmospherics to rock rampage.

Air seemed just as enthused as we were at the discovery that underneath it all lies a pretty kick ass jam band, able to hold an audience in its thrall for more than a few minutes at a time.

As a shimmering light show blinded the crowd, “Surfing on a Rocket” played out as a desperately gorgeous serenade beamed in via satellite.

The premed pillow talk of “Biological”—“Some skin, billions of genes again it’s you. / XX, XY that’s why it’s you and me”—became a launching pad for an intergalactic jam that ebbed and flowed off into eternity, and would still be building to new crescendos were it not for the constraints of human energy.

“Run,” a heartbreaking, glitchy ballad for the era of damaged CDs, appeared in hollowed out form, leaving the synth to soar gorgeously, high above the bass.

Putting on their metaphorical robot masks for a moment to channel that other French electronic duo, Daft Punk, Air turned “Sexy Boy” and “Kelly Watch the Stars” into pure synth euphoria, gleefully eradicating all remaining humanity in their music to thrilling effect.

The audience loved it, calling the band back for two encores, and prompting Godin to proclaim, “You’re the best crowd we’ve had since the beginning of the tour, and I swear I never say that.”

Knowing Air, though, he was probably just trying to get us in his Caddy.

—Staff writer Nathaniel A. Smith can be reached at nsmith@fas.harvard.edu.