The Virgin Suicides (soundtrack album) by Air (FR)

This is an ambient, instrumental work that matches the vaporous tone of the movie (and all of S. Coppola's movies). But it also works on it's own. "Bathroom Girl", "High School Lover" and "Dead Bodies" are the highlights.

It is vaporous, but not vapid.

This album can feel a little bit dull and boring at times. This is mainly due to the lack of layers present as the music can feel a little simple. It needs that extra bit of magic, which could be adding an extra instrument or adding more of a hook to some of the songs to make them more enjoyable and less repetitive. However, there are some moments where the music really shines as you get flourishes of the quality we are used to. This is mainly evidenced on Highschool Lover and Playground Love which are infectious and fun. Other than these 2 tracks, the rest seems like filler content in my opinion. Overall, there is definitely a lot of enjoyment you can get out of this album by playing it in the right setting but in terms of quality it is quite weak.

From Jboy56 02/05/2022 18:59

A very beautiful but a tad boring soundtrack. I have heard better.

Favorite Tracks:Bathroom Girl, Dead Bodies

From planetneutral 05/19/2018 10:46

Like most soundtracks, a mixed bag with more monologues and narrative-driven cacophony than I care to listen to.

From JoaoMoreira 06/06/2016 19:25

It's a good album but not exciting. It has some good moments and other redundant ones. Dead Bodies is a great tune!

I take it back. I listened to this before I saw the movie, great and powerful work.

Wow! One of the most disappointing albums in the history of popular music! I'm not sure they ever recovered (commercially) and the record company promoting as the big follow up to 'Moon Safari' didn't help. Certainly any thoughts that Air were the great white hopes for the future of music were definitely put on hold. The music is a bit wafty and ambient, it's a bit like candyfloss - looks OK, first bite's really exciting, it's completely insubstantial, soon forgotten and might make you feel sick. "Playground Love" is pretty good, "Bathroom Girl" is a bit better - darker and stranger, "Highschool Love" is also not bad, but a bit creepy.

Air provides a psychedelic caress between the disassociative culture that gave us ambient music and the idealistic and naive world of post war America which gave us The Birth of Cool. Synthesizers pulsate in a vast but colorless world of texture like a throbbing Ansel Adams photo; then angelic voices and soaring guitars drip from the sky like water color. All done with the subtlety and garishness of a flirtatious look that lasts a second too long.

After listening to Playground Love I thought a fantastic album is expecting, but I found this one disappointing.