Rating: 3.5/5 
But this is not to say Le Voyage isn’t without its share of highlights. Members Jean-Benoit Dunckel and Nicolas Godin are nothing if not dynamic musicians, and the album, befitting the adventurous arc and tone of its companion film, goes through a few neat iterations: the fast-paced “Parade” which slams through bird nests and erupts in 8-bit adornments, Mellotron, choral arrangements and sparse, spacey accompaniment on guitar set against hyperactive hi-hat stutters and cymbal splashes, is a welcome change-up to the record’s otherwise subdued sound. Similarly, the gently thrumming lead-off single “Seven Stars,” featuring guest vocals from Victoria Legrand of dream-poppers Beach House, at first hums with quickened percussion and low piano tones, ringing and clanging like a capsule undergoing massive G-force pressure before achieving escape velocity in ascending guitar runs and breaking into an exosphere of synth and intertwined vocal layering, pounding heartbeats underlining its breathlessness. Its dark drama has an understandably murky element to it, akin to that of Legrand’s band or even the dim, vintage feel of Méliès’ impressionistic film, even while its excitability bears greatest resemblance to 2001’s prickly 10,000 Hz Legend.
To less of a degree, tracks like “Moon Fever” and “Sonic Armada” make their mark as well. The former echoes Talkie Walkie’s (and the Lost in Translation soundtrack’s) “Lost in Kyoto” in its bare warmth, wrapped as it is around a single calmingly repetitive riff on piano, whereas the latter sets Mellotron, synth and bass at odds with expressive strums of electric sitar and digitally altered animal cries intended to match the explorer-astronomers’ first encounter in the film with the Selenites, the moon’s green-skinned natives (the presence of whom might complicate a certain presidential candidate’s plans to colonize the itinerant satellite). “Cosmic Trip” manifests in dripping tones and a persistent percussive rhythm that has the effect, together with noise crowding in from all vectors and drawn-out vocal samples, of creating a crushing, spectral feel not far from the kind on display on Air’s The Virgin Suicides soundtrack, or some form of Big Bang in reverse – the theoretical Big Crunch. Breezy closer “Lava,” with a wall of wailing synth and choral “ahs” following some work on banjo and the type of heady, fuzz-heavy instrumentation listeners will find most familiar, is also a return to the more freewheeling form recently lacking in the band’s discography.
By contrast, “Retour Sur Terre,” “Homme Lune” “Décollage,” three interstitials, as well as “Who Am I Now” fall mostly flat, or at least come across as thin and infrequently substantive, even in spite of (on the lattermost track) guest turns from the members of dream-pop outfit Au Revoir Simone, and the track’s attractive, watery-piano-and-windchimes aesthetic. The contributions from Legrand and Au Revoir Simone aren’t surprising, given the sizable debt owed to Air by its fellow somnolence-peddlers after nearly two decades of producing dreamy, sexy suites that successfully incorporate everything from early British electronica to American lounge to French pop from the 1960’s. But by record’s end Le Voyage Dans la Lune seems a better twin to Méliès’ film than a standalone release. This is slightly problematic for Air, who as a group have been largely unable to capture the ephemeral cool of their earlier output, despite confident if scattered reinventions on 2007’s Pocket Symphony and 2009’s Love 2. And the fact several of the tracks on Le Voyage hearken back to past releases may also indicate a reticence to experiment too seriously. Anchored by the aesthetic limitations of the film, the album’s truncated length and a slight reluctance to travel too far afield from the comforts of their home planet, Air may wish to aim for more distant – and sizable – cosmic bodies next time around.
