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Paul McCartney fans would no doubt rather see the left-handed bassist rocking out - as he did in that raging testosterone guitarfest that closed the Grammy Awards - than sitting around in a tux snapping his fingers with a full orchestra, as he did earlier in the show. But give the softhearted, still-cute Beatle a break: This 14-song set of mostly pre-rock swing tunes (plus two originals) that Macca learned in his Liverpool living room growing up is a warmhearted trifle, a music box of chocolate truffles proffered to his new wife, Nancy Shevell. With Diana Krall and a team of studio pros backing him, McCartney lounges his way through pleasant if hardly thrilling versions of "It's Only a Paper Moon" and "The Glory of Love." Not what he does best, perhaps, but look on the bright side: The lyrics, by Irving Berlin, E.Y. Yarburg, and Frank Loesser, are much better than they'd be if he wrote them himself.

- Dan DeLuca

Le Voyage Dans la Lune
(Astralwerks ***)

Georges Méliès is having quite the comeback. The revolutionary French filmmaker, famed for his dreamily surreal visions of the future, is the prime subject of Martin Scorsese's Golden Globe-winning, Oscar-nominated Hugo. With that, the hundreds of shorts Méliès shot at the dawn of the 20th century have been screened and scrutinized, none more than 1902's Le Voyage Dans la Lune (A Trip to the Moon), based on the stories of H.G. Wells and Jules Verne.

Then there's Air's attentiveness to Méliès' moon trek. The French electronic duo (Jean-Benoit Dunckel, Nicolas Godin) are renowned for their own cinematically starry-eyed aesthetic, especially after having scored Sofia Coppola's The Virgin Suicides. This CD+DVD package finds Air scoring Méliès with a surprisingly human sound, an emotional, occasionally aggressive musicality that never dips into spacey kitsch. Air bubbles ("Cosmic Trip") and gets bombastic ("Parade"). They groove and gallop as if striding merrily on the moon ("Sonic Armada"). Although the Air pair doesn't rely exclusively on mirroring Méliès, there is a rich sense of jittery movement to the duo's compositions that calms considerably to let Beach House's Victoria Legrand (on "Seven Stars") and Au Revoir Simone ("Who Am I Now?") spin their lyrical tales.

- A.D. Amorosi

No One Can Ever Know
(Fat Cat ***)