M83 - Dead Cities, Red Seas & Lost Ghosts
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Music CD Cover
Artist: M83Edition: Music CD
CD Release Date: 2004-07-27
Music Label: Mute U.S.
Soundtracks:
Music CD 1
- Birds
- Unrecorded
- Run Into Flower
- In Church
- America
- On a White Lake, Near a Green Mountain
- Noise
- Be Wild
- Cyborg
- 0078h
- Gone
- Beauties Can Die Bonus
- Birds
- Unrecorded
- In Church (Cyann & Ben Version)
- Gone (Live)
- Dead Cities, Red Seas & Lost Ghosts
- Run Into Flowers (Video)
- America (Video)
Free Music Notes for Dead Cities, Red Seas & Lost Ghosts
Free Music Review: Breathtaking, amazing, ungodly gorgeous
Hit: 5 Stars
Listening stations in major music stores really suck. There's always some dolt who doesn't know how to use it ("SCAN HERE" is never in his or her vocabulary), or someone's playing objectively awful music with the volume at 11 so that everyone in the store can hear the decline of western civilization without ever having to leave their place in line or turn on the radio. Every once in a while, though, the accursed contraptions prove useful (and no, I'm not talking about seeing whether or not the string tribute to Evanescence is a joke or not). M83's Dead Cities, Red Seas & Lost Ghosts is one of the very, very few albums that's bought me hook, line, and sinker solely from a 30-second clip of one of its songs.
This record was released in 2003 under the French electronic label Gooom, but was only available as an import until July of this year. Re-released in a shiny, new, (and most importantly) expanded edition in North America through Mute, I found a copy and immediately bought it after previewing it on a Borders listening station. If you're familiar with my relatively conservative buying habits, that alone should speak volumes about this consistently amazing album's sound, but if you're not one of the lucky, lucky people who has ever received a gift from me, then maybe you should just read the review.
The album's under-a-minute intro "Birds" starts things off in Boards of Canada territory, with, true to its name, birds chirping, as well as an uneasy, electronic vocal reciting, "Sun is shining/ birds are singing/ flowers are growing/ clouds are looming and I am flying," which serves as a sort of "This is your captain speaking..." monologue, preparing you for the journey ahead. From there, the album explodes into the absolutely HUGE "Unrecorded." A towering, swirling, hypnotic, shoe-gazing affair, its first few chords elicited the same sort of stunned awe that I experienced upon my first listening to Loveless. Though I may take some crap for comparing any band that isn't My Bloody Valentine to My Bloody Valentine, M83 is certainly worthy of this compliment. Layers and layers of buzzing melodies, synth strings belting out from the back, and a simple, steady drum machine all combine to create a wall of sound that Phil Spector could never have dreamed of.
After I finished listening to "Unrecorded" for the first time, I had the extreme pleasure of realizing that the album never retreads this phenomenal, mountain-moving sound. "America" starts off with quietly ominous synths and uneasy vocal samples before bursting into its crimson, chaotic, maelstrom of a midsection, overflowing with pure sound, only to abruptly hush itself and then eventually climax again. All within the space of three minutes! "Run Into Flowers," the heart of Dead Cities, Red Seas, & Lost Ghosts, incorporates ethereal vocals, overstated (in a good way) beats, and memorably melancholic, layered synth lines into the mix to evoke a dreamy, otherworldly feeling that will stay within you long after the track's end.
Though I've only discussed a few, every track on this masterpiece is a definite highlight. Dead Cities, Red Seas & Lost Ghosts is an album that takes the listener into an entirely separate universe for just under an hour and is ideally experienced as a whole. It is simply one of the most beautiful albums I have ever heard. Buy it, pop it in your CD player, and TURN IT UP.
Dead Cities, Red Seas & Lost Ghosts Poster
Dead Cities, Red Seas & Lost Ghosts is the second album from French electronica duo M83 (Anthony Gonzalez and Nicolas Fromageau) who, thankfully, derive their name from a spiral galaxy in the constellation of Hydra and not from an interminably lackluster stretch of noxious British motorway. The name certainly nods to where their wide-eyed, spaced-out technicolor imaginations are fixed, but they also know how to sound ponderously intense--hence the cold, cello-aided sonority of "Gone," possibly the only track on the album that defies the lambent warmth of the purring analog synths and beguiling reveries that make the rest of the album as enticingly therapeutic as a thermal spa.Humane post-rock is clearly M83's strongest attribute because both "Run into Flowers" and "On a White Lake, Near a Green Mountain" are curiously pretty cameos, far removed from the automatic anemia of other workmanlike button-pushers. The high point, though, is the symphonic sweetness and motherly female choral vocals of "Beauties Can Die," which is rather like being cradled in the arms of an angel, or at the very least the arms of Sigur Ros and Lesley Garrett. If one really has to die and go to heaven, one rather hopes the journey up there will sound like this. --Kevin Maidment
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