Air France, 'No Way Down'

Electronica
Air France No Way Down
Something In Construction
ESSENTIAL "Beach Party"

Alert your favorite upscale boutique: Its soundtrack for the new year has arrived. Its MySpace page brands the Swedish group "Socialist roof top music," but Air France is more like "capitalist shopping-mall music," with elegant horn samples and burbling bass intended to be accompanied by the cha-ching of cash registers. "No Way Down" is meant to blend in with its surroundings, its pleasantly soothing indie-dance rhythms not quite insistent enough to demand your full attention. Like the Avalanches' 2001 album, "Since I Left You" (its most obvious, and superior, antecedent), "No Way Down" blends atmospheric sound effects, gentle instrumentation, and polite, nonintrusive dance rhythms into a seamless whole. "Beach Party," which moves its vocals front and center, is the album's sole exception. Borrowing heavily from Lisa Stansfield's "All Around the World," it transforms Stansfield's melancholy R&B ballad into a xylophone-heavy tropical rainstorm. "No Way Down" is far more effective as background music - or for a little dinner-time ambience - than it could ever be as the main event. The results are pleasant enough, if you're paying attention, but there appears to be something about Air France's music that inspires a waking form of narcolepsy. (Out now) SAUL AUSTERLITZ