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21 of 22 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
A Brilliantly-Executed New Wave Revival!, April 15, 2008
M83's Anthony Gonzalez has always embraced the epic nature of his songs. When browsing through his catalog of amazing songs, you start to realize that his best are always the ones that build into grand displays of what electronic music can be with the right person behind the synth keys. On, Saturdays=Youth, Gonzalez is expanding this idea by introducing an increased importance placed on songwriting and pop sensibilities. The album is, by all accounts, a new wave album in the purest sense of the genre. Recalling the best work of groups like New Order, Flock of Seagulls, or Depeche Mode, Gonzalez has created what could possibly be his most impressive album to date.
Saturdays=Youth plays out like the long-lost soundtrack to a John Hughes movie (actually cited by Anthony as an inspiration for the album), or a bonus CD for Donnie Darko. The scene pictured on the album cover should back me up on this. Gonzalez does more than just capture the mood of the cinematic era, however. The majority of the lyrics on the album are just as lovingly cheesy and melodramatic as can be, filled with such poignantly bad lines like "7am/dusty road/I'm going to drive until it burns my bones" or "The cemetary is my home/I want to be a part of it/invisible even to the night/and I'll read poetry to the stars." But these awesomely bad lines hardly distract from the mood of the album; if anything, they enhance it! It's like watching Sixteen Candles all over again!
That's not to say that you had to be around in the 80s to enjoy this though. I'm too young to remember anything from that era, and everything I know about it is second hand (Anthony, himself, is only 26). Still, I've found Saturdays=Youth to be an enchanting album. In the past, M83 has been about these really deep synth-heavy songs that build and build and assault your eardrums with pure electronic bliss. This album is a much softer, spread-out experience. There's never a sound that is too harsh or commanding, despite the fact that every song is built upon several layers of different synthetic instruments. Album opener, "You, Appearing," for example, never ventures beyond a simple piano line and atmospheric synth harmonies.
"Kim & Jessie," meanwhile, starts out of the gate with heavy drums and a blast-from-the-past synth lead that should totally be the intro song to some 80s throwback film, like Tears for Fears' "Head Over Heals" on the aforementioned Donnie Darko. "Skin of the Night" is a brilliantly sexy tune with shrill female vocals. She sings, "She digs her nails into her naked chest/miles of veins fan out like a road map/she pulls back the skin to show her ribs/that twinkle like shooting stars." It's pretty decent "mood" music for anyone who happens to still be living in 1985. "Graveyard Girl" replaces a lot of the keyboards for guitars, and the overall feel is unlike anything else the album has to offer. Gonzalez does manage to throw in some vocal synths, however; you know, the choral sounds on a keyboard that never get used? To be able to make them sound cool, to me, is a great sign of talent.
Possibly the greatest thing about Saturdays=Youth is that everything feels familiar despite the fact that this is all original material. There are not very many artists out there today who share Anthony's love for 80s new wave music and bring that love out in their music; so being able to hear a fairly stellar recreation of it is entirely welcomed. It should go without saying that many M83 fans may feel disenfranchised with the new approach that Gonzalez is taking to creating music. There are only a few moments on the album that sound like they could've been on another one of his works. "Couleurs," is clearly one of them, as is "Dark Moves of Love." Beyond that, however, this is completely new territory; both for Gonzalez and his fans. Personally, though I enjoyed his past albums almost without exception, Saturdays=Youth seems like the culmination of his work; an album that will not die out after a handful of listens, but one that will continue to receive plays for years. New wave is not my favorite of genres, to be honest, but this is an album that I simply cannot get enough of! I highly recommend it to anyone who wants to relive the 80s, or at least be reminded of their better musical moments.
Key Tracks:
1. "Kim & Jessie"
2. "Skin of the Night"
3. "Graveyard Girl"
4. "Up!"
5. "We Own the Sky"
9 out of 10 Stars
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6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
At the bend of the road to oblivion, April 16, 2008
This is the most perfect M83 album yet. Compared to Gonzalez's previous ambitious, yet somewhat tiresome When the Dawn Heals Us, Saturdays=Youth is a refinedly concentrated short story of shoegaze/retro bliss. The undeniable melodrama of his fragmented narratives (see "Graveyard Girl") is more digestably sparse in the smaller architecture of the 11-song heartbeat; but the awkward, naive statements effectively serve to enhance the awkward stages of Gonzalez's characters. The vulnerable, diaphanous and hopeful retro sensibility breathes vividly in Gonzalez's soul, and yet his carefully chosen sounds reveal the added shimmer and depth of 21st century techno. His tunes are so thoughtfully derived with historical precision that they work to disarmingly transfigure a pure moment from the 80s (perhaps even more pure...). Moreover, Saturdays=Youth is so obsessed with avoiding even the slightest hint of superfluous ambience and percussion that the effect is slick and masterful.
The artwork says it all: Francis Bacon-ly beautiful, fashion-conscious kiddos brim-full of inexplicable emotions, gathering at the edge of an autumnal wood. The deep colors, pale fires within those fading trees is a testament not to what those kids are feeling, but rather that they are still able to feel at all. It's easy to roll busy eyes and judge a scene like this as the classic Western petri dish of youthful self-obsession--self-fulfilling Goth-mentalities of longing and despair; obstinate druggies replaying irrational fantasies in their growingly incompatible minds; lone dancers, searching aimlessly; unfounded Greco ideals of divine love that serve consumed egos. Even while Gonzalez may be having some fun with certain trendy, filmatic cliches of the past, I think his vision suggests something perhaps more important--it's a photographic warning of the death-nail engaged into the hearts of the eager by a matured society, dulled into oblivion by its perpetually successful ritual of grinding every innate emotion you have into vapor. In these kids' faces gradually appears the fear of creativity's death.
Gonzalez's youths represent the last ceremonies of emotional freedom. They not only inhabit the earth, but apprehend it. They meditate within the private spheres of night, resting on Whitman's bed under the stars of contemplation. They celebrate the loves of their friends, immortalizing their names in harmony. They embrace their dustness like the Beats chasing their Beatrices. They are infused with everything.
But the innumerable stresses will be sent; it will invite itself into the very fabric of their clothing. They'll forget how it all went exactly.
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7 of 8 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Saturdays=Youth, April 15, 2008
M83's sole core member, Anthony Gonzalez, calls Saturdays=Youth his paean to being a teenager and the discovery that comes with it. In fact, I've always linked M83's music to that volatile period of time, no matter how Gonzalez intended for me to hear it. The flagrantly synthetic drones on Dead Cities, Red Seas and Lost Ghosts (2003) and the exploding circuits on Before the Dawn Heals Us (2005) resembled cascades of emotion pouring out after years of repression. There's a subtle but perceptible hint of violence rumbling at the bottom of songs like "In Church" and "On a White Lake, Near a Green Mountain" that would erupt if only it could make it past the layers of heaving synths that crush it. With an impossibly expansive sound and an inclination to remain in a perpetual state of emotional release, M83's discography is a terrifyingly close aural approximation of--to borrow one of his song titles--"Teen Angst."
On Saturdays=Youth, Gonzalez aims to transport us to a happier place, to cut out the garbage and the herky-jerky experiences that inevitably populated our youth. "I loved being a teenager," Gonzalez explains in the album's press release, "That's when I discovered music and started to take drugs and party with my friends." However we spent our Saturdays as teenagers, they were respites from the drudgery of the rest of the week, when we could cut our teeth on being young in a big, beautiful world. Working with coveted producers Ken Thomas and Ewan Pearson (the latter of whom is responsible for some of the most joyous remixes of the decade) to bring that respite back into our consciousness, Gonzalez more than delivers, not only making us nostalgic for the past, but even filling in the gaps of what may have never been.
Saturdays=Youth is M83's most conceptually loaded record, but it also features his most manageable songs--easy to digest and easier to love. I know fans who didn't care for Before the Dawn Heals Us, perhaps because of its tart flavors and a few tracks that were jammed in neutral, but Saturdays=Youth remains sweet-sounding and elated throughout. It begins with "You Appearing," a dramatic introduction that starts with a simplistic piano line and ends with blossoming synths and hypnotic vocals, as though Gonzalez were documenting the point at which the possibilities of the teen years are first revealed. Next comes "Kim & Jessie," M83's most elemental pop song to date. Lyrics have always been incidental to the effect of M83's music, but I love the tension in Gonzalez's words: "Kim and Jessie / They have a secret world in the twilight." What will they do in that world? The song's tone suggests that whatever happens will make the titular characters feel young, free and alive. Even when the songs contain a shade of mystery, as on "Skin of the Night," they seem to be traveling toward someplace unequivocally wonderful.
Though Gonzalez was actually a teenager in the '90s (he's 26), it was important to him that Saturdays=Youth channeled '80s synth-pop bands such as Depeche Mode and Tears for Fears. And while "Up!" and the album's first single "Couleurs" sport an undeniable '80s fetish, the dominant influence on Saturdays=Youth is still early-'90s British shoegaze, as it has been on all of M83's previous records. The spirit of Cocteau Twins, Pale Saints and My Bloody Valentine hang over Saturdays=Youth like guardian angels, especially on "Graveyard Girl," "We Own the Sky," and the absolutely swoon-worthy "Dark Moves of Love." Shoegaze is both an idealistic and nostalgic genre, refreshingly free of pessimistic overtones, so it would make sense that M83 would tap into it for this record. When all of the instruments pile up and form a tidal wave of unthinkably gorgeous sound, as they do on nearly every song here, it will always bring me back to Kevin Shields trying his very hardest to create the definitive soundtrack to young love.
Before "Dark Moves of Love" even has a chance to finish, the long, sobering drone of the final track, "Midnight Souls Still Remain," takes over and we're suddenly back within a corporeal reality. It's at this point that the unabashed joy and freedom of being a teenager transitions into young adulthood, with its responsibilities, limitations, and awareness of mortality. Knowing how M83 conceptualized his epic closers of the past ("Beauties Can Die," "Lower Your Eyelids to Die with the Sun"), this interpretation would fit, and it's apparent that Gonzalez is thinking about the finiteness of life and the world as much as anyone else in his mid-20's would be. Yet "Midnight Souls Still Remain" may be Gonzalez's way of keeping these memories contained in a kind of box where they can be accessed whenever we feel like revisiting them. After all, Saturdays=Youth isn't the past as we young adults lived it (that would be Limp Bizkit and Masta Ace for me, unfortunately), but as we remember it, and memories can outlive everything else. Our Saturdays and our youth may be long gone, but we can always come back to this.
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