Live Review: Air

Listening to Nicolas Godin walking up and down the neck of his bass during La Femme d'Argent is one of life's single pleasures. Feeling those low notes rolling up through the stalls of the great hall was really something else.

In some ways, the idea of seeing Air perform live, especially somewhere as cavernous and austere as the Sydney Opera House, is the antithesis of their central vibe. Their light-as-cappuccino-froth, retro-futurist, music-as-lifestyle synth pop ambience is designed to be an easily digestible private experience. They create a lounge room space within your head, complete with carpeted walls. They provide a big bowl of multi-coloured uppers and downers resting on a low glass table. "Kick back," they say, "let's dream of something together." When you push their slinky French personalities through giant speaker stacks, all their cute little quirks and intricacies and squishy textures are magnified, transforming them into full-blown artistic expressions. It forces you to take that extra step and explore the feelings and ideas that their soft-edged recorded work only hints at.

Songs like How Does It Make You Feel went from being a slightly melancholy sci-fi late-night pop song to Radiohead-lite, its plaintive central refrain becoming demanding and almost overwhelming. Kelly Watch The Stars went from a summery foot shuffler to a booming race to finish off the main set. This makes it sound like the show was heavy — it wasn't. It was vibrant and fun, and the setlist was 20 years of effortlessly cool French kitsch condensed into a single relatively short show. They still applied their softly-softly approach, but the Concert Hall expanded their sound in such a way that the kitschier aspects of their songs were burnt away, leaving surprisingly effective pop noir tracks that tugged the heartstrings more than once.