M83 - Saturdays = Youth

by Tom Mendelsohn

M83 = perfection

"Everything M83 do sounds like coagulating stars, and while the bombast is dialled down a bit on 'Saturdays = Youth', it still has an epic, timeless feel to it."

It’s probably old news to you, this, but M83 get their name from a galaxy. This single fact encapsulates the scale and ambition of the band’s work, and it’s pretty suggestive of how they sound too.

Everything M83 do sounds like coagulating stars, and while the bombast is dialled down a bit on 'Saturdays = Youth', it still has an epic, timeless feel to it. It is also, mark you, absolutely stunning, and easily as big as its ideas. It also has the benefit of focus, which the band sometimes lacks – the whole album coheres very nicely, and drifts past in an ecstatic fug.

This is not by any stretch an immediate album. It burns very slowly indeed, in fact, with a more introspective, nostalgic feel to it than other albums by the band. Much is made of the influence of 80s teen movie director John Hughes on the record, as well as all the fairly obvious shoegaze overtones, but the music isn’t retrogressive, or, really, noticeably 80s-ish at all.

In fact, it’s pretty modern-sounding, with clean production and no doubt lots of terrible subtle computer trickery going on in the background. There is a real longing quality to it, and it is pretty obviously the work of a chap in or near his 30s wishing he was 17.

Anyway, it’s characteristically scintillating; it falls short of their 2003 masterpiece ‘Dead Cities, Red Seas & Lost Ghosts’, but only because just about everything else in the history of recorded music does as well. It’s still a shoe-in for one of the albums of the 2008.

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