I only ask that there was at least one electronica record out there that didn’t make me feel like I was in an episode of Tomorrow’s World or locked inside a great-glass elevator with only Joe Meek, Buzz Lightyear and R2D2 for company. Not that I’m averse to a bit of the old Telstar Satellites any, just that the space-race is better suited to the likes of NASA than it is to two-thirds of the record producing public, who may have much in the way of beeps and buzzes and intergalactic whirry noises but little in the way of your common or garden rocket-science. And Air’s JB Dunckel is no exception.
Darkel is both the nom de plume and the title of the debut solo album from one half of Gallic electronic pop duo Air. It’s still chill-out, it’s still loungey but this time JB Dunckel comes lisping through the ether and the origins of time like some dilithium crystal carrying starman with an armful of Donovan records under one arm and V-shaped guitar under the other. And the result, against all odds, is genuinely pleasing. Yes it’s a bit camp, yes it’s a bit fey, but beneath the (domin)matrix of synths and the fizzy, whirry android noises there’s a bevvy of solid and able tunes. ‘TV Destroy’, ‘My Own Sun’(a cross between New Order’s ‘Blue Monday’ and ‘Well Respected Man’ by The Kinks) and ‘Beautiful Woman’ have more balls and more impact in their short, sharp 12 minutes than the sum-total of Air’s output to date. And there’s also a discernible heart here beating; ‘Some Men’, ‘Pearl’ and ‘How Brave Are You’ amongst a number of tunes where Dunckel abandons the sly, chaffing post-modernism of records like ‘Talkie Walkie’ and ploughs headlong into a soothing, spiritual troposphere, not unlike John Lennon.
Darkel is more thoughtful, more sincere and arguably more straightforward than anything out by Air, but that doesn’t make it any less chic.
Occasionally patchy, but as a digression of sorts, sufficiently handsome.