Customer Reviews

Dead Cities Red Seas & Lost Ghosts

5 star:		(9)
4 star:		(3)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

There are a lot of things to like about this album. It was electronic French music that didn't sound like air. It was an album that relied heavily on the keyboard and didn't sound like Mu-Ziq. Most shockingly though was that the band set out to make a My Bloody Valentine record and actually succeeded. To be fair, Loveless was a once in a lifetime accomplishment and Kevin Shields' masterpiece will never be replicated with a bunch of cheesy synths. Dead Cities won't have that album's indeffinate selflife, but given what their working with, its about as close as you're going to come.

Doing for synths what MBV did for guitars, French duo M83 have created an intensely beautiful wall of sound that is sometimes so dense as to be overwhelming. Named after a gorgeous spiral galaxy in the Andromeda Strain (and not after a noxious British freeway), the music is appropriate to their moniker: it is a swirling mass of thick sound alive with mystery and beauty. The songs melt together into a glacier destroying everything in sight, but they maintain individual entities, and for every massive moment like "In Church" or "Cyborg" there are moments of fleeting fragilty like "Beauties Can Die", a fourteen minute treasure that spends most of its time in reverent silence.
Because of its import status, this wasn't in consideration for many top ten lists from 2003, which is a shame: in hindsight, it was a rather weak year for music, and this album is head and shoulders above other releases from those twelve months - even if it was only in Europe. Get it today! It is well worth the money, especially if you find it for cheaper.

I was lucky enough to be in France a few months back and I picked up a copy of this fine album based on the pitchfork praise. I didn't know what to think when I first gave it a spin.

Here's the deal...you know that anthemic synth sound at the beginning of Van Halen's "Jump?" Well, this album takes similar synth sounds, plays chords, has them drone over the entire album, adds layers of more synths, adds drums, some great droning guitar and some occasional vocals. It's like My Bloody Valentine's Loveless, but with more synths instead of guitars. If that sounds good to you, you'll love this album. However, it took me off guard at first.

So yeah, four stars, it's a great album, but a few mediocre tracks keep it from being perfect.

Let me just say the sound samples available on amazon doesn't do this cd any justice you really have to hear how each track progresses to really appreciate the whole appeal of the music. If I was to describe their style simply think GYBE! that uses synths instead of guitars!! Lots of rantings and powerful cadences that makes it sound as if the world was ending right before your very ears!!

For me there are no standout tracks cause I love each and everyone of them. I would even categorize it as post punk in structure along with the likes of GYBE!, Mogwai and Explosions in the Sky but with a unique character.

Give it a try. If you like it, then this will probably become one of your all time favs.

There are few albums over the course of a year that I will listen to that completely envelop me on first listen. "Dead Cities, Red Seas and Lost Ghosts" is that kind of album. It's dark, optimistic, intense, warm and soothing at the same time. It does use elements of Shoegazing, but not to the point where it seems derivative. I'd recommend this for fans of: Sigur Ros, gy!be, Postal Service, Air, Boards of Canada, Mum and yes, the sounds of Shoegazers.

first, those of you who dont like "abstract" music shouldnt be here, you'll be extremely disappointed.

Well .. i guess this is the evolution of music, no vocals (or should i say, no HUMAN vocals), it basically takes the music to another level. this is the kind of music where you should simply close your eyes and let it take you to another world, another era, a world of dead cities and red seas...
In the first track (Birds), a robotic voice says "sun is shining, birds are singings, flowers are growing..." and repeats all over again, i guess the irony here is that there are no birds, flowers or sun, you can feel it through the background music. In the last track (Beauties Can Die), there is an 11 minute gap in the middle of the song, where you hear nothing, until the final climax. Songs like Be Wild (#8) and Cyborg (#9) are hauntingly provocative.

But dont get it wrong, despite all the skepticism the title of this album suggests, it has a beautiful sadness in it and you'll probably ask for more after hearing the last track.

Overall, this is an awesome record (worth the imported price) and is sure worth 5 stars!

Gonzalez was never one to triumph completely in the compositional department alone, but M83's strength lied in the ability to augment simple synth work with breathy, layered production, making these relatively basic electronic renderings flow with extended grace.

Sometimes, I think it can't be a matter of simple coincidence that sound, when rendered visually, often appears as ever-changing green fluctuations stretched over an infinite black void. The power of music to seemingly construct, alter and distort space can be staggering and, when expertly manipulated, absolutely awe-inspiring.

Dead Cities, Red Seas & Lost Ghosts, the second album from electronic duo M83, is such an album-- and one that, with any luck, will win them widespread recognition outside their native France. Simply put, this album sounds absolutely huge, its relentless attention to detail eclipsed only by the stunning emotional power it conveys. For fifty-seven glorious minutes, an impossibly intricate tapestry of buzzing techno synthesizers, distorted electric guitars, cheesy drum machines, and subdued vocals generate a sense of bodily movement through a landscape of beauty, disappointment, glory, and decrepitude. Dead Cities is an album that not only envelops you, but affords you room to explore its vast expanses of beautifully constructed sound.

The most immediately noticeable thing about Dead Cities, Red Seas & Lost Ghosts is how different M83's palette of sounds is from the ones usually used to create music possessing this much beauty and depth. Countless musicians have humanized electronic sounds by generating tones that are warm or organic, but M83 have chosen a more challenging route, conveying warmth and beauty through that familiar filtered buzz of hackneyed synthesizers usually found in techno and dance tracks. Simply put, the sounds that have constituted some of the most vapid, hedonistic, and forgettable music of our time have come back to make us cry.

M83 open their album with one of their most striking misappropriations of trite instrumentation. In "Birds", a tinny sample of chirping birds is combined with swells of synth strings and a computerized voice repeating, "Sun is shining, birds are singing, flowers are glowing, clouds are looming and I am flying." In another context, this combination might have been disastrous, but M83 manage to turn it into something surprisingly powerful. The computerized voice is run through an odd, wavering melodic filter that affords it just the right degree of harmonic dissonance with the synth strings, and takes on a decidedly unsettling feel, turning it into a mantra-like invocation of the unsteady world you're about to enter.

Once inside, you're exposed to a landscape of such depth and complexity that it often seems infinite. Rather than just ending, sounds and songs disappear off into the horizon, always bringing the promise of something familiar but unforeseen to follow. "Unrecorded", the first full-fledged song on Dead Cities, makes clear why M83 have drawn so many My Bloody Valentine comparisons. Building upon a foundation of fuzzed-out guitar, rich bass, synth strings, and a drum machine that sounds surprisingly like the acoustic drums of Loveless, M83 layer burbling techno synthesizers into complex rhythmic intersections, as the song's vast backdrop slowly fades away. Just like My Bloody Valentine and their ilk turned fuzzy, distorted electric guitars into something divine and volatile, M83 recast harsh sawtooth waves as voices of reflection and regret. In "Run into Flowers", almost-real strings and whispered vocals are juxtaposed with overdriven drum machine clicks, as an insistent 4/4 beat carries you through images of lush fields, abandoned factories and polluted rivers.

This kind of juxtaposition factors heavily into "In Church", as a clear pipe organ and an angelic, reverb-laden chorus are assaulted by blasts of white noise. Finally, a wrenching, synthesized melody enters, providing a profoundly moving counterpoint to the sterile beauty that preceded it. By the time you get to "0078h", it's impossible to tell whether the heavily altered vocals are of human or computerized origin, and it's also completely ceased to matter. Oftentimes, the most organic sounds on Dead Cities are the most formless, and the most glaringly synthetic sounds the most emotional.

Dead Cities, Red Seas & Lost Ghosts ends fittingly with the 14-minute epic "Beauties Can Die", which recalls at first the melodic, pastoral electronica of Mum's Yesterday Was Dramatic, Today Is Okay. This peaceful opening is soon completely overtaken by a sound that gradually transforms from a low, earthquake-like rumble into a blast of synthesized static. Synthesizers and harmony vocals are layered and layered until the sound is so explosively, beautifully gigantic that you won't mind it's damaging your hearing. The earthquake rumble returns, each time ushering in even more layers of ungodly gorgeous sound, and each time evoking a stomach-turning combination of fear and excitement. At the crash of a synthesized cymbal, the song descends into submerged ambience, and ultimately into a long silence, before resurfacing with distorted radar blips and terrifying shrieks of howling noise.

As "Beauties Can Die" fades, you're left with the feeling that you've just returned from a journey-- that the images passing through your mind for the last hour couldn't possibly have been the result of mere imagination. An album like this extends far beyond your speakers, guiding you through an impossibly rich, detailed world of sound while also giving you room to explore it yourself; you don't listen to Dead Cities, Red Seas & Lost Ghosts, you inhabit it.

-Matt LeMay, May 12th, 2003

This stuff is great, it doesn't sound quite like anything else. It has aspects of other music. The analogue synths of Kid A, the gradeur of Mogwai, the electronic feel of Autechre, yet it sounds nothing like any of the aforementioned groups. This is without a doubt one of my top five albums of the past year.

this is a very nice album. it's funky, and i like that. It's pretty, eclectic, interesting, and lyric-free, for those music snobs among us who don't like actual songs with words and hooks and so forth. Well, these aren't actual songs, but they are beautifully crafted little snippets of glorious sound. Did I mention that the band is from France? How cool is that!