Album: Air & Baricco

I much preferred the gossamer Air of Moon Safari over the prog-stodge Air of 10,000Hz Legend, so this collaboration with the Italian writer Alessandro Baricco is more to my liking, confining them as it does to a support role, providing moody backdrops behind his narration. Baricco's three stories are bleak Western parables, each featuring characters who are courting death: in "Bird", an old gunslinger waits, half-blind, for some young gun to come along and take him out, inheriting his status – and with it, the certainty of his own death; in "La Puttana di Closingtown", the distraught lover of a murdered whore rides to a distant town, where he deliberately goads a gambler into shooting him dead, too; and in "Caccia Alcuomo", a sheriff chasing an Indian presumed to have raped and killed a boy, finds that he can never get close enough to shoot the suspect, and eventually returns to tell the dead boy's father that it was in fact he, the sheriff, who killed his son, before blowing his own head off. Whoops! I've spoilt it for you now – but don't worry, because it's all in Italian (a translation is provided), and much of the project's beauty resides in the dry, matter-of-fact tone of Baricco's voice. Air's settings are discreet watercolour tints – a warm synth pad, wind noise, some Spanish guitar, with an occasional ominous trickle of piano notes or cool respite of flute tracking the stories' contours.