Album Review: Concrete and Glass by Nicolas Godin

"Writing about music is like dancing about architecture". So reads one of the most famous quotes about our profession, which has a curiously uncertain origin. Said to come from Elvis Costello, it is a sentence that could have originated from any of a handful of his contemporaries in the late 1970s. Nicolas Godin, as an architectural graduate who moved seamlessly into musical composition, would surely have been aware of its existence, and could well have taken it in hand for the construction of Concrete And Glass.

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Looking back on his career with and without Air, Nicolas Godin's beginnings as an architecture student become more and more apparent -- and not just because the first song he created, "Modulor Mix," was a tribute to Le Corbusier. A skilled use of structure and space is just as important to composing music as designing a building, and the weightless drift of his music is as much of a feat as a skyscraper that seems to defy gravity. Much like an architect, over the years Godin has built on his music's foundations while continuing to innovate.

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The two fundamental principles of any Air or Air-related project are 1) that it will display a total disdain for modern music's rhythmic rough-and-tumble and 2) that it will sound a lot like Air. Concrete and Glass, the second solo album from Air co-founder Nicolas Godin, sees no reason to buck this trend. The record is designed as a hymn to the world of architecture and it sounds utterly, decadently Air, full of blissed-out vocoder ballads that would have slotted effortlessly onto the band's 1998 debut, Moon Safari.

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