M83 “Before the Dawn Heals Us”
Mute
2003’s “Lost In Translation” may not have won
the long-denied Bill Murray an Oscar, but its gloriously shimmering
soundtrack reintroduced synthesizers and shoegaze bands like My
Bloody Valentine and The Jesus and Mary Chain to the public eye.
While the soundtrack merged both old and new tracks, including
fresh compositions by My Bloody Valentine’s Kevin Shields,
the standouts were My Bloody Valentine’s
“Sometimes” and The Jesus and Mary Chain’s
“Just Like Honey,” proving that the best shoegazing has
already been done. Enter the French. M83’s “Before the
Dawn Heals Us” is the follow-up to its critical breakthrough,
2003’s “Dead Cities, Red Seas and Lost Ghosts,”
and finds co-founder and Frenchman Anthony Gonzalez on his own. The
album is no less lush for Nicolas Fromageau’s departure, with
the compensatory additions of lyrics and analog instruments.
Acoustic instrumentation or not, the songs are constructed out of
an electronic framework that wavers between pounding strength and
fragile beauty. The first half of the album lays out the best M83
has to offer. At its peak, the band recalls the post-rock of groups
like Sigur Ros and Godspeed You! Black Emperor as well as the
shoegaze influences. “In the Cold I’m Standing”
envisions a man on the shores of Sigur Ros’ Iceland, resolute
against the rising tides of frozen noise. “Don’t Save
Us From the Flames” is straight-ahead aural bombast, using
barely contained drumming to propel waves of keyboards, bass and
voices. The album begins to falter after the spacey “I Guess
I’m Floating.” “Teen Angst” plays like a My
Bloody Valentine outtake with throbbing video-game keyboards, and
“Can’t Stop” is little more than high-pitched
voices and a melody line that self-referentially repeats itself
into monotony. And the penultimate “A Guitar and a
Heart” could use a little more of both. Words are a new and
unsuccessful addition to the M83 vocabulary. The incorporation of
GY!BE-style spoken segments into “Moonchild” and
“Car Chase Terror!” verge on the melodramatic, and the
lyrics throughout hazily reference both a post-apocalyptic future
and the B-movie horrors of “Car Chase Terror!” Too
obtuse and New Age-y to reflect the music behind it, M83’s
lyrical minimalism confuses any sense of cohesion and deflates
their celestial soundscapes. The closest M83 comes to a mission
statement is with its album cover. A photo of a city at night, it
depicts a glistening metropolis full of skyscrapers rising out of a
futuristic Superman fantasy. Though occasionally the album evokes
the sight of the distant lights of “Lost In
Translation’s” shoegazer Tokyo, more often than not,
the images of “Before the Dawn Heals Us” are more along
the lines of walking to Westwood at 1 in the morning to pick up
your girlfriend from work. M83, content to try and leap tall
buildings in a single bound, forgot to reach for the stars.
““David Greenwald