M83: HURRY UP, WE’RE DREAMING
[rating: 5 stars]
M83: Hurry Up, We’re Dreaming
Label: Mute
Release date: October 18, 2011
Hurry Up, We’re Dreaming is twenty-two tracks of flawlessly crafted synth, drenched in intrepid, day-glo, art-pop scenery, barring a wasted moment. What M83 (Anthony Gonzalez) has accurately described as “Very, very, very epic.”
The double-album experience marks M83’s sixth record release, and an ambitious one at that. Siting Billy Corgan’s twenty-eight-track, nine times platinum, alternative magnum opus Melon Collie and the Infinite Sadness, as inspiration, more evoking of The Breakfast Club Soundtrack, Anthony Gonzalez, forges his ongoing love affair with dreams and the magical escapism of his youth into seventy-four minutes of bittersweet nostalgia, reconciled through epic dance jams. The result, is a very long, polished bedroom recording, you can bounce and sway to, contrived as a listener album, not a consumer.
Thematically, this is an album romanticizing youth; utter isolation, ecstatic joy, heartbreak and self-discovery. The first record follows one character’s longing for a relationship to finding love (even if it only lasts two songs), through a period of self-mourning, and new dawn and redemption.
While this is very much a unified album, almost every song on Hurry Up, We’re Dreaming beautifully occupies a space all it’s own. The stand-out single and notably, one of the most redeeming singles of the year, “Midnight City”, is a humid, adrenaline-driven dream of a song, unlike any of M83’s previous work. Here, Gonzales’ voice is extremely compelling, less of a whisper than usual and more of a throaty cry, as eerie vocal harmonies, haunting sub-textures and synthetic strings adeptly sweep you into a highly danceable urban groove, swimming in broken neon light. M83’s signature dream pop aesthetics are all here, but each track feels larger and more bombastic than ever. “Reunion” is an effective track, ruminating on familiar territory from 2008’s Saturdays=Youth; nostalgia for youth, only this time around with heavier soaring synths. And, there is no better example for magnifying the familiar than on “Wait”, with it’s wistful Pink Floyd-like acoustic guitar riff, and high-pitched vocals elevating the song into something bigger and better than any songs off Gonzale’ previous albums.
Hurry up, We’re Dreaming, like almost every “indie” album recorded this year, adopts nostalgia as the basis from which to create, but what makes Gonzalez unique is his ability to dig deeper into the music and memories of his youth and not only move forward with it, but transcend it.
