You're young: do you want to float?

Air's film score for Sofia Coppola's dreamy, haunting movie based on Jeffrey Eugenidies' dreamy, haunting 1993 novel is, well, dreamy and haunting. Synthesizers pulse, strings soar, ethereal soprano choirs lament. As the album unfolds, you might even imagine that five lithe but tortured '70s suburban blondes are being inexplicably driven to tragic despair while the boys next door watch, mesmerized, and you might be right.

The French synth duo's 1998 debut Moon Safari was a retro-futuristic gem of sexy, atmospheric tunes. Spacey, salacious, and slightly camp, it combined Daft Punk electro-pop with Pink Floyd trippiness. The Virgin Suicides takes all those elements and adds heartbreaking pathos. Its noir-lounge sensibility (very David Lynch) combines irony and nostalgia into a sweeping symphonic whole. The movie provides the narrative, so Air's Nicolas Godin and Jean Benoit Dunckel are free to focus on the mood; the songs don't have to go anywhere, so they function as parts of a whole, building tension, tantalizing, mourning, and sighing.

"Playground Love," the only track with actual lyrics, sets the stage for the rest of the album as Gordon Tracks croons, "I'm a high school lover, and you're my favorite flavor," and a saxophone wanders introspectively. The song captures adolescence's naïveté and emotional urgency as well as its tendency to romantic angst—to a teenaged girl, everything seems tragic. Then your sister kills herself and your parents pull you out of school and lock you in the house, and the tragedy becomes real. The movie (like the novel) is narrated by the neighborhood boys, who try to piece together the girls' story years later. Similarly, "Playground Love" is the memory, not the experience, of adolescence. Few 15-year-olds would have the sophistication to appreciate it, but to this 21-year old, it's pitch-perfect.

The album isn't merely a soundtrack—it stands on its own—but it is extremely impressionistic; the ambient languor of Moon Safari sounds like radio pop compared to The Virgin Suicides. This is music for people who like sonic landscapes. However, real guitars, bass, piano, and drums humanize all the outer-space noises. Even the synthesizers are old-school analog. Like a faux antique, the album is "distressed," in every sense of the word. The tone is touching and sinister throughout. In "Cemetary Party," a graveyard choir and pealing bells propel an eerie melody over a plodding reverb synthesizer. "Dark Messages" follows with the oompah of a creepy, slightly out-of-sync carnival organ. Something isn't quite right, but you can't put your finger on it; dread creeps. "Ghost Song" sounds like one of the dark castles in Super Mario Brothers. "Empty House" overlays a drummed heartbeat with electronic squiggles. The next song is called "Dead Bodies."

The morbid beauty of The Virgin Suicides culminates in the stark, elegaic finale, "Suicide Underground." Giovanni Ribisi's computer-distorted voice tells the story: "Everyone dated the demise of our neighborhood from the suicides of the Lisbon girls. People saw their clairvoyance in the wiped-out elms and harsh sunlight. Some thought the tortures tearing the Lisbon girls pointed to a simple refusal to accept the world as it was handed down to them, so full of flaws." Like those girls, Air's dark, lyrical vision for a dark, lyrical story seems slightly too lovely for this world. (Astralwerks)

—Molly Ball

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