Electro pop super group Starwalker delight with debut album

Losers Can Win is the début album from Air’s Jean-Benoit Dunckel and Bang Gang’s Bardi Johannsson.

When I review an album, I normally like to review it track by track. As good albums will have X amount of tracks that stand up individually and tell a story when put together. Bad albums are a hotchpotch of noise that don’t hang together either individually or as a collection. What I'm trying to say in a very convoluted way, is that for the first time, I've listened to an album and I can only talk about it holistically.

The five track album has a very Air feel. It’s a beautiful floaty, pretty atmospheric and futuristic sounding album. Other tracks, Bad Weather, Think Of The Ocean and Moral Sex have the same Barbarella on acid feel. Even when it picks up for more a dance feel for Theremynt, it just seems to sit perfectly with the familiar Air vocals and rhythms. One track seamlessly beeps, pounds and floats into the other. 

Another USP about this album is the insanely creative video, directed by Saevar Gudmundsson.

Air have been missing from the ‘scene’ for a while. And they've been missed. They've let more inferior rivals like Daft Punk rise to super-stardom thanks to backing by man with the Midas touch, Pharrell Williams. I have to confess I know little about Bang Gang, but off the back of this, I might hit Spotify.

I’m secretly a Francophile. I love their music from Camille to Serge Gainsbourg. I love their movies from Tricolour to Bande a Part. I love their philosophers from Michel de Montaigne to Simone de Beauvoir. I love their cheese. I love their wine. I even love their arrogant, sex pest men. And now I can add Starwalker to that list.

7 out of 10

Published on May 12 2014