M83 - Saturdays=Youth
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Free Music Notes for Saturdays=Youth
Free Music Review: fantastic
Hit: 5 Stars
These Frenchmen have produced a fantastic album that mixes kitschy 80s pop with the sounds of the shoegaze scene. Great live band - saw them in May. Totally great gig.
Favorite songs on this thing: Couleurs, Kim & Jessie, Graveyard Girl, Midnight Souls Still Remain, etc, etc.
I can't yet say if this is their best album overall, probably not as good as "dead cities" - although it's different. Need some more time I think.
Pick it up!!!!!!!!
Free Music Review: Can't Stop Listening to This One
Hit: 5 Stars
I wasn't even trying to get into new music this year, but this jumped out at me from a Pitchfork review. After playing it all the way through twice, my girlfriend and I were hooked; our friends have beent the same way. If you like a little mellow, 80's style pop, you can't go wrong with M83. Amazing live show as well. Left Thanksgiving dinner early to see 'em and weren't disappointed.Free Music Review: M83 Saturdays = Youth
Hit: 5 Stars
I listened to this all summer and never tired of it. It's fun, beautiful and lush. This is my first M83 album, and while I liked the '80s slant, I'm ecstatic to see they have a darker edge. I'm about to order everything else they've put out. I've been bored with music for awhile and this one woke me up.Free Music Review: Haunting me
Hit: 4 Stars
M83's music has always been very airy, synthy and vaguely abstract in nature. Very post-rock, very spacey electronica, but not pretentiously so.
But M83 takes a step in another direction "Saturdays = Youth" -- instead we get a tongue-in-cheek, vaguely nostaltic expanse of 80s-style teenage angst. There are some jarringly angular moments, but Anthony Gonzalez mostly turns out a pretty, electro-riddled little experience swathed in shoegazer instrumentals and pop melodies.
It opens with a very gentle little piano melody, hesitating as if unsure what to play, and is joined by flickers of ephemeral synth. "It's your face," a woman's breathless voice sings, as a man murmurs gentle in the shimmering wash. The entire thing keeps swirling in on itself like a forming tropical storm, growing more ethereal and incomprehensible by the second.
Now drop all expectations of what this album will be like.
"Kim and Jessie" is a vaguely New Orderish synthpop melody with lots of thudding beats and wailing synth loops. And most of the songs hover in the middle -- rollicking blurry guitarpop, swirling shimmering dance, urgent electronica, spacey balladry dripping with dance rhythms, shoegazer epics that build up to a mountainous climax, and ethereal pianopop smothered in cloudy synth. The finale is a continuous, ten-minute ambient hum that frankly bored me silly.
But it takes until the deliciously tongue-in-cheek "Graveyard Girl" for the intent of this to become clear -- it's a wistful, mocking soundtrack of teenage angst and moodiness. The very serious line ""I'm fifteen years old and I feel it's already too late to live. Don't you?" is deliciously ironic.
Technically it's usually a very bad idea when you fix something that wasn't broke, and Gonzalez appears to be doing that when he revisit the musics and teen movies of the 80s. As a result -- since he does not wholly abandon the spacey electronic/shoegazer sound -- "Saturdays = Youth" is a mesh of different styles, and there are moments where the fusion doesn't work.
But it's quite striking that so many of these songs DO blend together well. We have colourful loops, swirling shimmers, cloudy enveloping waves, and little blips of synth, studded with sharper synth beats. This is all woven togetjer with a lot of gentle piano, and some jangly pop guitar interspersed among the buzzing cycling shoegazer guitar.
Unlike before, vocals take front-and-center positions here -- Gonzalez's soft, processed voice glides through. And Morgan Kibby's high, breathless vocals can add anything from gruesome pathos ("She digs her nails into her naked chest... she pulls back the skin to show her ribs/they twinkle like shooting stars") to the tongue-in-cheek monologue from "Graveyard Girl" ("The cemetery is my home/I want to be a part of it/invisible, even to the night/I will read poetry to the stones/wonder if one day I become one of them").
It takes awhile to really clue in on what M83's intent in "Saturdays = Youth" is, but the band's album is a pretty good fusion of synthpop and shoegazer.
Free Music Review: M83 progresses from a molecule to a full DNA strand!
Hit: 4 Stars
What an exciting new album from M83! It seems M83 has decided to mix their futuristic sound with a little bit of the past in this new entry to their catalog. From the album cover serving as an homage to teen movies of the 80's, to the new wave song structures, atmospheres, and synth sounds, you'll get a pleasant mixture of feelings from this!
As expected, the album is extremely tranquil and paralyzing, the majority of the time. You'll definitely get the ethereal floating you're probably hoping for as a longtime m83 fan. For those unfamiliar, I would say expect a nice cross between Air and Orbital, with a pinch of your favorite 80's pop on this record.
The record opens with a nice therapeutic feeling track, "You, Appearing", but then bursting out immediately with a swirl of energetic sounds and portrayed colors with "Kim & Jessie", one of the standout tracks of the album. Next up is my personal favorite song on the album, "Skin of the Night", which features guest female vocals that are intensely angelic. The track feels like it SHOULD be the theme song to THE LOST BOYS 2 if someone was cool enough to make it this year. Other standout tracks include "Couleurs" which is the danciest track on the album and is most reminiscent of classic techno like Orbital and the likes. Also, "Up!", is the other track featuring the same female vocalist who really makes this album the ethereal ride is needs to be.
The only weak parts of this album that stops it from getting the higher rating, is that it boasts "Graveyard Girl" as it's single, which is, in my opinion, the cheesiest and weakest M83 song in their entire history. It's another one of those tracks that is an obvious throwback to New Wave but unfortunately the chord progressions he chose to use will have you feeling like you've already heard this song a million times before, and there's nothing about it that really gives it it's own character or makes you want to listen to the song again. Other than that, the album itself doesn't really flow that perfectly all the way through, it feels more like separate unrelated tracks, plopped together for a release, but you can't always expect perfectly flowing album structures!
In the end, a wonderful release from M83! One of my favorite listens of the year so far, aside from the new Portishead, which is absolutely great. M83 is one of the more important artists in electronic music right now and anyone who's not a fan yet should take the time to check it out. Also, listen to 2005's "Before the Dawn Heals Us" - a wonderful, wonderful album.