M83
Saturdays = Youth

There is an old acquaintance who has been telling me for years that he couldn't live without his precarious condition. He appreciates the freedom from constraints it provides. He's okay with working for occasional, temporary, or off-the-books jobs. He's fine with it, as long as he feels free to move from city to city, free from an employer and a collective labor agreement.

The thing that strikes me about him is that he has a partner who is also occasional. Anxiety. They cohabit; in fact, they are inside each other when he sees the balance at the ATM inexorably decreasing without signs of recovery. That rapid descent into negative values is not just about money. But it doesn't speak of unconditional surrender either. That minus sign before the numbers suggests a sort of closure towards everyday life and simultaneously an opening towards a mood where a constant vibrant and soft music plays, a music that creeps under the skin and produces tremors and adrenaline, in a paradoxical narcosis: full awareness reigns supreme, adrift among airy emotions that offer no solid footholds.

My acquaintance listens to M83 from Antibes, France. In 2008 they produced their fourth album. For the guy in question, it could be his personal apocalypse. Wandering between shoegaze, ambient, synth pop, and dream pop, they reach the peak of their bipolar melodic production made of soft sadness and evasive self-fulfillment.S=Y is an album that suffocates with its cloak of openings that fade into nothingness and its foundation of adolescent emotional instability. It could lend credibility to one of those teen movies full of paranoia and made to not be understood (and so, to clarify, I refer to things like Donnie Darko, hoping not to mislead you), or it could fit perfectly into the soundtracks of Coppola's films.

Comparisons with other realities tagged in the same musical categories would be sterile because the path that unfolds proudly and tremblingly from track to track is made in dreamlike material (from the REM phase) that only leaves its mark for the moment. In the sense that it has the merit of not being precisely pinned down but of sounding renewed with every listen. The intro and the first track are enough to knock on the door of these types and then decide whether to visit their home or not. The intro, therefore, is a crescendo that dares you to enter the S=Y constellation, where a sexless voice – better to say imperceptibly male – is absorbed by the synth mists, in an emergence that culminates with the whispered plea "save me".

Cut.

The bombastic Kim and Jesse bursts in, dazzling with synths falling like August stars and a rhythm supported by bass, guitar, and drums in ethereal representation of sounds produced by tangible instruments. The matrix is strongly teen (angst). It feels like facing innocence shattered by the first doubts. The illusion/disillusion blend, typical of just entering puberty, manifests with unexpected maturity, depicting a puzzle of reasoning and daydreams, the kind that can be done in the solitude of oneself. The musical instruments on which you sweat are scarce, and, except in the first case, they are heard even less. All this makes the references of this path increasingly precarious, marking nevertheless a landing of M83's sounds on more concrete and defined shores, more pop. For some critics, this represented a limitation. For the writer, no. In fact, it was one of the conceivable evolutions and was rendered in music with great wisdom and spontaneity in building truly intimate and shareable melodies. The fact that one can empathize with this record, or remember how we used to be when we were human, is a major asset for this operation of securing today's listener, lost among image bands and musical devaluation. I might also take it all back at this point, and tell you that indeed, this record offers a hook, and it's constituted by our past moods: conflicted and confused, but at least ours. Worth trying to lose and find oneself somewhat randomly.

3.5 but let's round up.