Meltwater

February brings weather that’s alternately trickling and restorative, then malevolent and jagged.

Hurry Up, We’re… excited about M83

Surprisingly, I’ve never shared the story of how I got into M83, so let’s start there. Back in 2005, the world of music was a simple place, with the post-punk revival reaching its apogee. I got my hands on the Japanese edition of Bloc Party’s debut, Silent Alarm, which came with three remixes tacked on at the end. The final one was M83’s remix of “Pioneers”, and it looked like it was over fourteen minutes long. In fact, it was less than six, but the way the CD was sequenced, the bonus-bonus song, “Every Time is the Last Time” got shoved into the same track as the remix, with a great big silence in between just for its own self-gratification. My bad.

Whether or no, the remix was sublime, and I rushed instantly to the shops to get my hands on more of this wonderful music. Dead Cities, Read Seas & Lost Ghosts was what I bought, and I couldn’t believe my luck. Fifteen-years old, and I was being treated to an electronic reinvention of My Bloody Valentine’s seminal shoegaze, with alternately woozy and then wailing synths set against pattering drum machines. It felt like the unfolding of the universe was being screened in my living room, in high definition, in a roller-disco.

Fast forward six years, and M83 have lost a founding member, gained a revolving cast of musicians with ultra-French names (Loïc, Pierre-Marie, Yann), and given birth to three more albums. Two of them, including the newest, which will see release next month, manage to be even more epic and imperious than Dead Cities… but, alas, that doesn’t necessarily make them better than that album. 2008’s Saturdays=Youth was a unique release, given the albums on either side of it. Real songs, harking back to a distinct aesthetic (the films of John Hughes), with attention paid to the overall dynamic of the album, to prevent it sounding like an unstoppable onslaught of exquisite noise.

The album before Saturdays=Youth was Before The Dawn Heals Us, and it is every bit as noirish as its title and artwork suggest. Vangelis might have turned down some of the arrangements for being too ostentatious, but the Blade Runner worship survives intact. Made-up film dialogue populates interstitial sequences, and searing guitars collide with the familiar template.

And now, or at least very soon, we have Hurry Up, We’re Dreaming, which is billed by its creator, Anthony Gonzalez, as being a stylistic cumulation of everything the outfit has made to date. Expect fireworks. And the birth and death of the day. And a futuristic love story hurried on by untamed oscillators and arpeggiators. Certainly, the opening two tracks, previewed in advance of the album, lend weight to Gonzalez’s suggestion. “Intro”, which features timely interjections from the unique vocal talent of Nika Roza Danilova (a.k.a. Zola Jesus), is an appropriate manifesto for the album, a warp-speed tour of M83’s career augmented by an Arcade Fire-aping choral finale. From its blissed-out embers comes the screaming, thumping “Midnight City”, which, sad to say, foregrounds Gonzalez’s more reedy pipes, which resemble a hollowed-out Dave Gahan. Stylistically, the song is a glorious mess, the National-style brass fanfare at the end adding to the discord. But it works… just.

But I can’t help but fear for the rest of the album—someone’s face could end up splattered in all that unbridled messiness.

Orchestral Manœuvres In The Dark

Last night, after a surprisingly backing track-dependent opening set from Northampton-based Maps, London’s KOKO was privileged to host M83, the critically acclaimed French electronic/shoegaze act masterminded by Anthony Gonzalez (and formerly Nicholas Fromageau). Taking to a stage cloaked in dramatic lighting and decorated with two sizeable keyboard rigs and a perspex-shielded drum kit, Gonzalez treated the suitably blissed-out crowd to a substantial twenty-minute opening solo set, weaving intricate melodies and emotive washes of noise from his custom analog synthesiser, which one member of the crowd compared to an aquarium. Drum machine rhythms skidded and burbled, and Gonzalez occasionally looked up from his toys to greet and thank the audience, which, in true KOKO style, rose up to the rafters of this beautiful converted theatre.

Then, just as our attention may have begun to lapse, to a riotous reception, Gonzalez was joined onstage by his two current band-mates: on keyboards and vocals, Morgan Kibby (which I always thought was a boy’s name, but there you go); on drums, an unnamed musician who looked like he’d jumped out of an 80s synth pop group, and had colossal drumming technique to match. Breaking immediately into Saturdays=Youth anthem, “We Own The Sky”, the three-piece then proceeded to deliver a perfectly paced set incorporating new songs, old songs and songs that didn’t sound like songs that anybody knew. Gonzalez, now a certifiably talented musician, alternated between carving out backing chords on his keyboards, and unleashing a wall of shimmering, keening noise from his white Les Paul, simultaneously singing lyrics that veered between John Hughes and Philip K Dick. Kibby, dazzling in a sparkly blue outfit, made light work of the breathy, cooing vocals on newer songs, and also impressed on the keys.

From a series of 80s-indebted synth-pop songs, such as “Graveyard Girl” and “Kim and Jessie”, the band then moved on to a more chilled-out segment, with songs like “Skin Of The Night” (with its straight outta Phil Collins drums) invoking gentle swaying from the crowd. Then, the band took on a more clubby vibe, employing tasteful dance-punk percussion and searing synths on various unidentifiable songs. Finally, after bowing out rather prematurely, the band returned to delight the crowd with a wonderfully extended, gloriously uplifting performance of “Couleurs”, the centrepiece of Saturdays=Youth. Most of the audience clearly wanted more; the time on the clock suggested otherwise. Though M83 played nothing from their landmark 2003 album, Dead Cities, Red Seas & Lost Ghosts, the manner in which they eked every last drop of emotion from their songs left every one of us with enormous ear-to-ear grins. M83 are an extraordinarily enchanting proposition on record; live, twice as much.