Review:

on 2011-08-30 CharlesMartel Said:

What is it with the year 2008? A significant number of the releases I have encountered from that year that I have checked out hark back to previous musical eras. "Saturdays=Youth" is no different. The moment I first saw the cover I couldnt figure out if this was some sort of modern photographic recreation of Edouard Manet's famous painting Le dejeuner sur l'herbe or whether the girl resting her head on her knees front right really is Molly Ringwald.

Once I had listened to it I decided it was more likely to be Molly Ringwald. Quite apart from the fact that "Pretty in Pink" and "The Breakfast Club" are two of my favourite films, the album had more in common with the style and sound of the eighties than anything associations with long dead French painters. It seems that a desire to recreate the oft-maligned music of the eighties in 2008 has permeated yet another release. Just listen to "Kim and Jessie" and you are immediately transported back to the dreamy synth pop of that era.

Frenchman Anthony Gonzalez may have assembled a handful of competent musicians and producers to help him with this project, but he might as well have gone back to the days of the Human League and Depeche Mode with this one. Like the music of that era, many of the songs possessed restrained melodies, smooth synthesiser passages and falsetto voices. Occasionally, such as on "Skin of the Night" and "Up!", the need for atmospheric vocals requires a female voice to provide the right effect, presumably because Gonzalez cannot reach those high octaves on his own.

It would therefore come as no surprise to learn that one of the producers credited on the album, Ken Thomas, also worked with the Cocteau Twins, another band to whom M83 owe a huge musical debt. There is little doubt that Gonzalez is driven by nostalgia, a fond look back through rose-tinted spectacles at an era when the sun always seemed to shine in autumnal hues and the music complemented perfectly the desire to lie beneath it dreaming of, well dreaming of whatever. Then again, like other albums from the year, this one has also been inappropriately tagged with the shoegaze genre on account of the occasional use of layered, textured guitar sounds - "Dark Moves of Love". As is so often the case, the tag is wholly inappropriate.

Perhaps such a desire to return to the eighties is a product of the age we live in. Since bands such as Bloc Party emerged, playing what is, to all intents and purposes eighties post-punk, along with others such as the Organ, Interpol and Editors, it was inevitable that some bands would move more towards to the New Romanticism of their mainstream counterparts. M83 are not alone - Cut Copy and Hot Chip have done pretty much the same thing with their 2008 releases so why shouldnt M83 jump on the same bandwagon. Hey I'm all for eighties revivials  it was my decade after all. But at least do it well.

Of course, as one who found his true musical home in the early eighties, this album represents familiar territory. Unlike some of the post-punk revivialists, this is not an unabashed copy, but more a re-interpretation, bringing influences back from the nineties into the eighties, as opposed to seeing the latter solely as a natural progression of the former. It takes a while, but eventually one can begin to discern that there is more to this album than the mere nostalgic, dare I say flatteringly derivative. And that feeling does not rely on the eleven minute filler synth-pop drone crossover of "Midnight Souls Still Remain", a track which suggests that the revivialist strand had run its course before the album was complete.

This was never going to be a classic album. It is more of a warm and comfortably fuzzy feeling you get from the re-acquaintance with something friendly and familiar. At times, interestingly when it strays furthest from its influences, it becomes strained, but there are enough pleasant memories evoked within to make this an album worth listening to. It might even make the top albums of 1986 if it had come out then.
Rating: 6/10