M83 "Saturdays = Youth"

M83 - Couleurs (Mute 2008)

M83 - Saturdays = Youth / Mute

From the minimalism of Berlin to the maximalism of modern France: M83 (meaning Anthony Gonzalez) has already earned plenty of webspace on this website for his work on last year's Digital Shades, Vol. 1. And certainly, since this album leaked nearly a month ago, a fair amount of press from all corners of the indie world has already been delivered for this album which bears such a phenomenally stupid-yet-totally unsurprising title. I write this not because I felt I needed closure on a group I used to love. I write this not because my kiss-off with Digital Shades last year was supposed to be a literary albatross and nothing I write on M83 in comparison could possibly be as good (though that's probably true).

As much to my surprise as yours, I write this as a personal memo not to close the book on M83. The drift of that lengthy Digital Shades review goes like this:

1. I love Dead Cities, Red Seas & Lost Ghosts. Still.
2. Before the Dawn Heals Us was nice but way too blatant. We already had Mellon Collie & the Infinite Sadness and it was much, much better the first time.
3. Digital Shades, Vol. 1 was a smart move because it wasn't excess. Gonzalez not counting it as an "official" album was a cause for concern.
4. I have to move to another city and start living as an adult, so I'm going to stop blogging for like four days.

Yet when "Couleurs" was posted in December of '07, I was blindsided. Here was a song that indicated no Taipei 101-style choruses, no repulsive teen melodrama, just the ghostly specter of a song with guitar tones copped straight from A Flock of Seagulls and a melody missing from the "Donnie Darko" soundtrack. And the beat! Well, of course I loved the beat. The brilliantly reductive Jori Hulkkonen remix added further fuel to the fire, and in the space of just three months I had gone from prematurely dismissing an album I'd heard nothing of to eagerly anticipating what had the potential to become one of my favorite records of the year.

Naturally, it was all too good to be true. In case you missed the Pitchfork.tv debut or blew by The Hype Machine (which, as I write this, M83 is currently atop of on the all-important "Most Blogged Artists" and "Most Searched" categories), this album is emphatically not a streamlined rendition of Digital Shades for the dancefloor. Though it starts promisingly with the "Coloring the Void"-esque intro on "You, Appearing," the following "Kim & Jessie" ensures the show rapidly devolves into a John Hughes musical score and we're even further down the hole of adolescence. So why bother, right? What are we doing writing about an album like this when we could just hit up another hiplife compilation?

The reason is that there's an interesting juxtaposition at work on Saturdays = Youth. Even though it seems like Gonzalez is regressing on a mental level when it comes to his lyrics (Maybe the 26-year-old is method acting for the part of a 15-year-old who's trying too hard; if that's true, he should be going out for Oscars instead of Grammys), he's wisened up on the production side of things and the music is maybe his smartest yet... in a roundabout way. He's not trying for the pastoral genius of his first two albums with Nicholas Fromageau, but he's also not shooting for the colossal heights of his first proper solo outing. Thank Ewan Pearson and Ken Thomas for that. Here are two guys who've helmed records by everyone from The Rapture to The Cocteau Twins. If anyone can capture the atmosphere of 80s post-punk records recontextualized for a shoegaze setting, it's them.

So despite the forced-sounding interruptions from Morgan Kibby that are supposed to provide some kind of narrative coherency (The one you'll remember from "Graveyard Girl": "I'll read poetry to the stones. Maybe one day I could be one of them: wise and silent, waiting for someone to love me, waiting for someone to kiss me." That's deep, man. Like, you should put that in the school literary magazine if you don't think it's selling out), and despite Gonzalez's best attempts to sabotage the goodness of his own record, Thomas and Pearson have somehow found a way to make this record not only listenable but enjoyable to those of us who have outgrown the heart-on-sleeve soliloquies of the modern adolescent.

More than the ambient throwback closer "Midnight Souls Still Remain," more than the Jori Hulkkonen remix of "Couleurs," more than the horrendous cover art (which doesn't make any bones about the target audience), the greatest triumph of Saturdays = Youth is that M83 as a unit have made annoying teenagers tolerable for at least one more album. Maybe you'll find more objective opinions about the merits of this record elsewhere. Maybe you'll find more critically astute essays elsewhere, too. But you'll be hard pressed to find a review outside of this one that tries so hard to be both. Hey, if you want to rile a teenager, fight fire with fire. In the dying embers of immaturity, I have found a link to the soul of this record that I intend to keep. Cue the sweeping synthesizers and let the gallery at The Hype Machine stand to applaud.