eMusic Review 0
When M83′s fourth album was released in 2008, critics used up a year’s supply of John Hughes references fixating on the band’s debt to the ’80s. But with a little distance, the record’s retro leanings are less remarkable than its prescience, anticipating a whole swath of sumptuously textured electronic/rock fusions that would follow in the next few years.
Heard alongside M83′s previous albums, Saturdays = Youth shows how much the band was looking forward. Dead Cities, Red Seas & Lost Ghosts was a volatile mixture of post-rock and ’70s cosmic rock — like Godspeed You! Black Emperor with a serious Heldon jones. Before The Dawn Heals Us found bandleader Anthony Gonzalez paying a loving tribute to My Bloody Valentine; the songwriting, more developed, remained overshadowed by the overall vastness, like decorative windows beneath looming thunderheads. (Not a bad thing — that tension is precisely what gives songs like “Don’t Save Us from the Flames” their power.)
But on Saturdays = Youth, Gonzalez finds a surer balance between figure and frame, and he also learns the virtue of pacing. “You Appearing” opens the album with the by-now typical swelling, yearning chords and whispered vocals, but “Kim & Jessie” digs… read more »
