april 2023

M83

FANTASY

(Mute)

Before sites like Spotify and Apple Music provided an endless, easily accessible catalog of an artist’s music, you actually had to collect it. My general rule has been to sample a new album on Spotify while I’m making meatballs or cleaning the bathroom. If I like it, I listen again. If I like it again, I buy it on Bandcamp or Apple Music. If I like it again, I often buy the vinyl. It becomes ‘collected.’

Compact discs and I broke up over a decade ago. But when CDs and I were madly in love, I would often make mixes and burn them onto CD-Rs - mostly for muses, sometimes for friends, and even occasionally for myself.  I carefully curated “sleep mixes” for four artists who effectively ushered me into dreamland:  Sigur Ros, Moby, Enya, and M83.

Admittedly, most of the songs on the M83 sleep mix are from the French (then duo, now) solo artist Anthony Gonzalez’ earlier albums — the self titled debut, Before The Dawn Heals Us, Digital Shades Vol.1, and Dead Cities, Red Seas & Lost Ghosts.  This is not to say that these albums, nor the ones that followed, were all hazy ambience and twinkly, soothing synths.  There is a bombast to M83.  The music often gets big and wide — euphoric — a trend Gonzalez leaned into as the band grew more popular, with varying degrees of success.  The 1980s-tinged Saturdays = Youth is a straight-up teenage dream-o classic, the bold double album Hurry Up, We’re Dreaming was mostly thriller and little filler, while more recent albums have felt wildly uneven.

That’s why M83’s ninth studio album, Fantasy, feels like a true return to form. After the ambient prologue “Water Deep,” M83 comes in hot with the signature-sounding “Oceans Niagara,” followed by the frenetic, upbeat “Amnesia” and the chill midtempo “Us And The Rest” — the first 15 minutes of the album lay out a proper sampler platter of all the styles that M83 does well. 

The songs get longer and more eclectic after this - “Radar, Far, Gone,” with its jangly acoustic guitar and earnest piano accents, is electro Sea Change. “Sunny Boy” goes full ‘80s kraut-rock once the beat drops, all arpeggiators, operatic falsettos, and radio-friendly electric guitars. Gonzalez employs Justin Meldal-Johnsen as a co-producer on Fantasy. The stellar JMJ has more famously appeared in the studio and on tour alongside two of my all-timers, Nine Inch Nails and Beck, so his participation here is most welcome.

Gonzalez is a French dude who’s been world-building M83 mostly by himself for over two decades. As a songwriter, this makes him a unicorn of sorts. I’ve admittedly never listened to or enjoyed M83 for the lyrical content, rather I’ve found how Gonzalez integrates vocal melody into his dreamscapes much more intriguing. Let’s face it, no one at an M83 concert is shouting the lyrics back to the band. It is, and has always been, the musical aesthetic that titillates, that tugs at the heartstrings.

Fantasy never strays too far from its dream-pop crescendoes, its sugary synth bass, and drum machine bliss. Some may find this underwhelming, but my favorite M83 albums aim skyward while never completely leaving the atmosphere. It’s the tunes that eclipse the 7 minute mark that tend to claim the most attention — especially the pleasant plod of closer “Dismemberment Bureau” and the lovely orchestrated Funeral For A Friend on Mars lament of “Kool Nuit,” perhaps the best candidates on the album to join M83’s early efforts on a new sleep mix. I think I have a few blank CD-Rs in a drawer somewhere…