PureVolume

Fractured Life
In Stores February 5th

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Air Traffic's Fractured Life is a debut album of brilliant, occasionally brutal, mood music. From the sexual euphoria of "Charlotte" to the bleak introspection of "Empty Space", its mindscape is one we have all experienced, or soon will. By turns anguished and exuberant, cocksure and crestfallen, it is rock lived at a pitch of bi-polar intensity that reminds you why you got into this stuff in the first place. Because life is fractured, actually, and its highs and lows have a disconcerting way of interrupting each other (which is one reason why Fractured Life makes its point all 12 of them - and leaves in 41 minutes).

It takes a particular sort of outsider mentality to create music of such rare accuracy and honesty. And, sure enough, Fractured Life is emphatically not the sound of a scene. Air Traffic are from nowhere, man. As far as they relate to any other bands you might have listened to recently, they are a shining example of the West by South West maverick tendency. Just as the small UK towns of Abingdon begat Radiohead and Teignmouth reared Muse, so Air Traffic are an unlikely product of Bournemouth, a Wessex border town on the British Costa Geriatrica with no rock heritage whatsoever. As the group's singer and main songwriter Chris Wall puts it; "There are no music venues, and absolutely no pressure to sound like anyone else. So you have the potential to develop your own style."

After the band were signed to Astralwerks/EMI, Air Traffic set up in Rockfield Studios to begin working on their their new album. Soon after, news arrived of a fatal car crash in Canada which killed a close of friend of Wall's girlfriend. I never really knew her, but I could feel my girlfriend's grief, and the sense of helplessness was overwhelming. This swiftly inspired the album's most poignant and beautiful moment, the aching piano ballad, "Empty Space". The 2 month Rockfield experience was, overall, cathartic. "It made us focus on what we do, and also appreciate how different we are from other bands." That emergent self-realization is unforgettably expressed in "No More Running Away", a heaven-bound anthemic chant earthed throughout by tribal drum. That sense of empowering otherness found voice in the album's title track, the last song to be written and, like "Empty Space", a haunting testimony to Wall's growing confidence as a chronicler of complicated emotions.

Just watch them go. In a world in which it is increasingly easy to confuse things that sound urgent with things that are actually important, Air Traffic are, triumphantly, both. Don't miss the U.S. version of Fractured Life, featuring the raucous new opening track, "Come On".