Air
Original Motion Picture Score for The Virgin Suicides
Astralwerks/Source/Record Makers

Virgin Suicides Director Sofia Coppola has said her film is as much about the wave of emotions after the end of a relationship as it is about the suicides of the Lisbon girls, the five sisters for whose deaths the film is named. The score, composed by French duo Air, perfectly captures the paradoxical heavy-footed, floating-off-the-ground sensation that follows many a break-up, not to mention the themes of fantasy, morbidity and unattainable beauty suggested by the film's title.

To craft this bleak-yet-beautiful paean to loneliness, Nicolas Godin and Jean-Benoit Dunckel use the same slinky basslines and soaring, synthesized melody lines fans have come to appreciate, but the mood here is much darker than that on the group's last album, Moon Safari, or its overplayed single, "Sexy Boy."

Rather than accompany its music with the wailing of not-quite-ready-for-Lilith-Fair vocalist Beth Hirsch, Air has played to its strength, packing the score with 12 lush, dreamy instrumentals. Only the first track (and single), "Playground Love" features vocals, and Gordon Tracks' breathy, loungy style perfectly suits the group's '70s sound, lending an eerie sultriness unlike anything on Moon Safari.

"Cemetery Party," with its repetitive, bassy synth rhythm, Dark Side of the Moon-style guitar and angelic (synthesized) church choir captures the doom-and-dream tone of Coppola's film quite sublimely. It does this by fusing the feel of the minimalist, instrumental sections of Dark Side of the Moon with Angelo Badalementi's work for David Lynch's "Twin Peaks" television show.

Two of the tracks, "The Word 'Hurricane'" and the standout closer "Suicide Underground," contain spoken samples; the latter distorts the speech of the film's narrator, in the style television news shows use when they wish to protect the identity of the speaker. This lends the song a morbid, bone-chilling feel and makes it a powerful closer.

The score for The Virgin Suicides does what all successful film scores — and albums, for that matter — set out to do. It creates and sustains a mood that prevails after the final credits (or, in this case, the record has stopped spinning). Just as Badalamenti compliments the films of David Lynch or Jeunet and Caro's City of Lost Children with stunningly surreal soundscapes, Air paints a sonic collage of breathtaking beauty while infusing it with incredible melancholia, and a twist of weird.

A stunner.

— Eric Wittmershaus (ericw at flakmag dot com)