The efforts that follow are more fragmentary in nature, but they still manage to maintain a delicate mood. "Clouds Up" percolates and drones with pleasing aplomb, "Bathroom Girl" provides an eerie funeral for a friend, "Cemetery Party" pits a synthesized choir of angels against a progression that's pure Ennio Morricone, and "The Word "Hurricane'" uses a textbook description of the weather phenomenon, delivered in deadpan fashion, as the eye of an unexpectedly vigorous storm. "Dead Bodies," too, rides along at a fairly brisk tempo, juxtaposing a roiling keyboard figure and a rock backbeat with majestic synth washes that splash heavenward before being yanked to earth again by "Suicide Underground," which is introduced by a dour, mechanical-voiced narrator who declares, "The only thing we are certain of after all these years is the insufficiency of explanation."
This line applies to Dunckel and Godin as well. By all rights, Air's music shouldn't work, but through some cryptic alchemical process, it succeeds beyond all expectations -- for some listeners, anyway. Not everyone will be converted, but those who are will no longer think of the word "soundtracky" in quite the same way again.
