The Musicgoer: Au Revoir Simone's Still Night, Still Light

AU REVOIR SIMONE
Still Night, Still Light
(Our Secret)
**** (out of 5)

Every time a song by Au Revoir Simone pops up on my iPod, the effect is instantly relaxing. But is “pops up” even the right way to describe the way the music of this all-female Brooklyn trio hits your ears? Perhaps “wafts” would be a better word: with their ultra-feminine, airier-than-Air harmonies, each Au Revoir Simone album seems borne on the backs of clouds. It’s the kind of music that the girls from Picnic at Hanging Rock might have sung, all assembled in their lacy summertime dresses, if their school choir had access to some ’80s synthesizers and drum machines.

Still Night, Still Light doesn’t fundamentally alter the sound they established on their first two albums, Verses of Assurance, Comfort & Salvation and The Bird of Music, so much as it refines it to new heights of dreamy yearning that makes The Postal Service sound like Queens of the Stone Age. Highlights include the hypnotic “Anywhere You Looked,” with its line about wavelengths magnetically pulling you toward your lover; and “All or Nothing,” which closes with the band resigning themselves to “gaze and daze and fall to dream something familiar.” Put this album on before you fall asleep and you might do the same.