Air is two musicians (Jean-Benoît Dunckel  and Nicolas Godin) who are typically French yet altogether worldly. Many of France’s best musicians have something of this, simultaneously from yet not of France. It’s an argument that could be levelled at, say, Jean-Pierre Massiera, one of France’s misunderstood geniuses, or Saintly Serge, adored and occasionally reviled, Jacques Dutronc, who in the ‘60s had a tiger (and several other wild animals) in his guitar or Marc Moulin who was so French he was actually Belgian.

But back to the World of worldy Air and their latest album, Love 2, with its grand tales of Armageddon and, more importantly, love. Sly sang, “Sing a simple song” and these boys know how to load them meaning. Take their lyrics. You can read what you like into them (and darn it there’s no more fun than doing so) but the truth is the voices are as much about textures and sounds as they are meaning. Just listen to Love on their latest (best?) album Love 2, in which the single word lyric (“love”, natch) is used primarily as a brass stab and keyboard motif as much as it is an actual word. As the Tom Tom Club once sang, “Words are stupid, words are fun, words can put you on the run”; or as Nicolas quips, “We can’t do complicated sentences because otherwise we make mistakes all the time.”