Track Listing

1. La Femme D'argent
2. Sexy Boy
3. All I Need
4. Kelly Watch The Stars
5. Talisman
6. Remember
7. You Make It Easy
8. Ce Matin La
9. New Star In The Sky
10. Le Voyage De Penelope

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #1617 in Music
• Released on: 1998-01-19
• Number of discs: 1

Amazon.co.uk Review
Moon Safari, the first album proper by this pair of middle-class Frenchmen, easily survives unscathed from its billing as that most deadly of sub-genres: dinner party music. True, Moon Safari, with its blatant bliss-provoking easy listening chimes, sits well beside Everything But the Girl's Walking Wounded or Portishead's Dummy, but the album is steeped in too much musical verve and gallic humour to become as dull as Chardonnay. "Sexy Boy", the first single, is a rock-out slab of electronica about a toy monkey, for instance--hardly the thing to discuss in polite society. This album's highs come with their two marriages with the contributing vocals of American Beth Hirsch. "All I Need" and "You Make It Easy" are shockingly successful, with Hirsch bringing gravitas and sincerity, flagging the album with strong emotional pointers in the midst of their musical adventures. If you didn't know, you'd think her words were sampled from a lost jazz classic--that's how good this record sounds. --Charlie Porter

CD Description
First full-length album from the downtempo pop duo, Air. Nicolas Godin and Jean-Benoit Dunckel both grew up in Versailles but met each other at college in Paris where they formed the band. 'Moon Safari' contains the singles 'Sexy Boy' and 'Kelly Watch The Stars'.

Customer Reviews

Nothing else matters
What can I say? If I sound over the top, it's because this is how the album makes me feel. I bought Moon Safari and Premiers Symptomes (also by Air) from Amazon based purely on other reviews. What I found out when I put the CD's into my player is that Air are one of those bands who can change your mood, your day, your ideas of music in the space of one album. I say one album, but I recommend you listen to Premiers Symptomes then Moon safari back to back. By doing this you get to see how Air's ideas changed, and you will also notice how they remain consistently brilliant. I like EVERY track on Moon Safari as much as the last, but my favourite track is Ce Matin La. Listen to it on headphones. It paints a visual picture in your mind using sound. Moon Safari is simply an album that, when you hear it you think, well, nothing else matters. That wasn't too over the top was it?

Just buy it!
I bought this album speculatively because it had been recommended to me by the automated Amazon system. On reading the other reviews it sounded like a great album and, when it arrived, I was not disappointed.

La Femme d'Argent& relaxes you into your seat/bed/cell in 7 minutes of musical perfection which, although it can play unobtrusively in the background, demands that every chord and note is listened to, and absorbed. Tracks like this, and the beautiful Ce Matin La are contrasted by the poppy, high-bass Sexy Boy.

The album is consistent in the relaxed, but by no means easy-listening nature of the tracks, but also wonderfully diverse in its styles. The introduction of a female voice on All I Need and You Make it Easytakes the emphasis off the instrumentalists, and allows them to play with a beautiful set of vocal harmonies.

If you want dinner party music, do not buy this album - it's just too good to be played in the background.

Delicious music
The rain starts to fall, a soothing bass riff floats in, an organ theme emerges, and La Voyage de Penelope begins. What an opener, and what a perfect way to relax into this hot bubble bath of an album!

Sexy Boy is still their most famous song and although a top tune, is not particularly indicative of their more laid-back style. Songs such as this may sound repetitive at first, but after a few listens, they become hypnotic, with delicate and intricate changes on each verse and chorus.

Beth Hirsh's breathy, Jane Birkin-like vocals add sex to the combination, and songs like Kelly Watch the Stars make ostensibly robotic, synthesised music sound as soulful and rootsy as any blues band.

Elsewhere there's the trumpet motif of Ce Matin-La and the pre-Cher Vocoder antics of Remember, the sadness of New Star in the Sky and the bleakness of Talisman.

Every song is beautifully crafted and performed, spanning the supposed gulf between primal dance music and pan-generational songsmithery.

Definitely the first 21st Century pop album.