Bloc Party - One Month Off
Bloc Party are a band caught uneasily between dance music and rock music. That’s not to say they can’t create great music, it’s just that their best songs are either Rock (‘Banquet’, ‘Song for Clay’) or Dance (‘Flux’, ‘Mercury’) and they don’t seem able to combine the two in a satisfying way like, say, The Rapture or TV on the Radio can. … Continue Reading
Frightened Rabbit - Live and Acoustic at Captain's Rest
There are Scottish Bands and then there are Scottish Bands, the main difference appearing to be how gloomy their music is. A wee Scottish lass I recently met assured me that Franz Ferdinand and Belle & Sebastian weren’t really Scottish because their music was, generally, far too cheery. Also only one of the Franz Ferdinand band members is actually from Scotland, but ride with me here a moment. … Continue Reading
White Lies - To Lose My Life...
M83 - Saturdays=Youth
Greetings and salutations; Saturdays=Youth, M83′s 5th album released in April this last year, is 100% a nostalgia trip. From the Duran Duran-esque synth noises, through the warm guitar washes and soft-voiced vocals to the teen movie archetypes on the front cover (including a dead ringer for my biggest teen movie crush ever, who is also name-checked in ‘Graveyard Girl’ in what is perhaps the best lyric of 2008: “She worships Satan like a father but dreams of a sister like Molly Ringwald“), this album evokes the ’80s better than most of the music from that decade.
Now I’m well aware that if you mess with a bull, you’ll get the horns; it’s so easy to retread the same tired paths over and over again without ever bringing anything new or even enjoyable to the musical table, but on Saturdays=Youth, Anthony Gonzales has managed to cherry pick the best bits of the golden age of synth music and construct it intelligently and emotionally without it sounding like the creation of a focus group. Rather, all the different elements feel like they organically came about because they just work well together. Even when second vocalist and Kate Bush voice-doppelganger Morgan Kibby sings “The hounds of love, they bite our heels” it feels like a happy accident rather than a musical in-joke for beard-scratching musos such as myself.
After a preparatory intro, the album really begins with ‘Kim & Jessie’, the lead-off single, which features particularly affecting harmonies and a chorus which feels like being punched in the face by Kevin Shields while you were having a bit of a snog with Nick Rhodes, which is to say momentous, unforgettable and something you want to tell your friends about despite being slightly embarrassed to admit you enjoyed.
The next track, my personal highlight, ‘Skin of the Night’ is huge, stately and icy-cold. If I were writing this review back in the ’80s, I could have described it as glacial – but seeing as that now means “a bit melty”, I’m stuck with the less compact depiction. It also, as I sit at my desk ostensibly doing my “real job”, just made me play air-electronic-drumkit in such an involved way I just knocked half a carton of Capri-Sun over my work. And what’s more, I don’t regret a second of it.
By the time you get to the second half of ‘Graveyard Girl’, it’s a testament to how much the album has won you over that you barely bat an eyelid at the awesome, towering ridiculousness of the spoken word section (“I’m 15 years old and I feel it’s already too late to live, don’t you?”). By then you’ve been caught and you barely notice anything else as you’re swept along in the freezing-cold but strangely comforting flow of the record as it worms its way around your brain poking the buttons you didn’t think still worked anymore.
The album, like Weird Science, is not without its faults. The production techniques that make the album as a whole so distinctive can render some of the tracks slightly indistinguishable, and the last track ‘Midnight Souls Still Remain’ is the rare time you lose a bit of patience with M83 – sure it’s appropriate enough to end the album with a formless, synthy blur, but does it really have to be over 11 minutes long?
But really, you can forgive him his little indulgences. It may be over eight months old now, but there remain a disappointingly large section of the population that haven’t heard this wonderful record. If you enjoy any Kate Bush, Duran Duran or Tears for Fears songs unironically I have two things to say to you. Firstly, congratulations, you are a good person and secondly, whether you’re a brain, an athlete, a basket case, a princess or a criminal, you should do yourself a favour and get hold of Saturdays=Youth any way you can.
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