Welcome back to 10 Records in 10 Days. A Facebook chain-turned 10 day blog series. The concept is simple. ”Post an album a day covering your 10 all time favourite albums. What really made an impact and is still on your rotation list, even if only now and then? Post the cover, no need to explain, and nominate a person each day to do the same”.
We’ve been nominated but rather than post without explanation, we thought it would be more fun to provide a little context. That is just the first of the rules we plan to break in this series. We are also not nominating anyone else (if you want to join in, you are more than welcome to do so) and we are also not adhering to any of the other implied rules either.
For the purpose of this series, we’ll be posting in the first person.
Day eight is an album that is flat out one of my all time favourites, one that makes regular appearances on the stereo and one that I never, ever, tire of hearing.
Air – Moon Safari
Whereas most of the previous seven albums in this series have brought about some grand musical awakening within me, Air’s Moon Safari caused no such epiphany. The impact it had on me was a simple one, I absolutely adored it. As did many, many others, judging by its near ubiquitous nature in 1998 and the several gagillion copies it sold. Yet while many others will have long since lost their copies or filed it away in the section of their record collection marked ‘dinner party tunes’, I still have my original CD and I still play it on a regular basis.
Back in 1998 I was struggling heavily with depression, I was not in the best of places socially and on a slow spiral that would ultimately lead me to dropping out of university and plunging further into a bleak world of my minds making. These are not the times that positive memories are made or in which uplifting musical associations prosper. Yet Moon Safari endures, it’s tranquility and beauty providing me with moments of peace and calm at an otherwise tumultuous time. Even listening now I find myself soothed by the melodies and soft, loungey synths and I’m taken to a place of relative contentment.
That aside, another reason I love this album so much is that it is full of absolutely divine pop songs. There are moments of tenderness, of heartfelt emotion and warmth. The soft lilting vocals of Beth Hirsch help give the tracks both a poignancy and a lullaby quality that could melt even the stoniest of hearts.
Moon Safari is an heavenly, dreamy album that I still love getting lost in and that still sounds as beautiful now as it did on release.
Alphabet Bands 
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