Air

Premiers Symptomes is the hot, soothing bath your draw for yourself at the end of a long day. This mini-album was originally released by Air, the French purveyors of a shamelessly pleasurable blend of absurdly lush lounge pop, smoochy soft funk and space-age lullabies, about two and a half years ago, now available in a much more affordable reissue. If anything, the production is even more lavish and immaculate than last year’s mini-revelation, Moon Safari, but there’s nothing gaudy or show-offy about it. It may, in fact, be the more perfectly produced pop record in recent memory, made with nothing but blissful listening in mind. Intuition, along with a campus radio sort of Puritanism dictating that music should serve a higher purpose than merely sounding good, suggests that anything this plainly hedonistic is empty, probably unwholesome and maybe even decadent, but Premiers Symptomes, is just the simplest, prettiest thing I’ve heard in ages. There’s loveliness you can hear, and there’s loveliness you can feel and Premiers Symptomes is both kinds.