MOG

M83’s latest, Saturdays=Youth, takes the listener on an imaginary time warp, one where seemingly dissimilar musical blends and memories meld, where Cocteau Twins era dream nostalgia merges with old techno styles to create a hermetically sealed world, imagined through the eyes and ears of various High School students, including you, dear reader.

This record is so well put together its like scenes unfolding in a film, all working together, to define us, then and now, each end of each song a smooth transition into the next one, so it’s the night out and the morning after, from puberty to prom night, the third wine cooler and the sick feeling next morning.

It starts off with a simple piano etching out the skies. Then the synthesizers come in, reminding us where we are, placing us there, on the morning of the day that changed your life, maybe it was the morning after the prom, the first letdown in a lifetime of letdowns.

Then the vocals bleed in from other tracks, spindled memories from college radio, from the back seats of cars, passing a whiskey bottle nicked from the parents sadly ignored liquor cabinet. Burning down the road, the music on so loud, you can barely make out the sound of the wind over the synths and voices that come in.

After the introduction of “You Appearing”, next up is the immediate ear candy, of “Kim & Jessie” and you’d be hard pressed to find a more lovely a fitting tribute to the decade of cocaine and synthesizers, with its lilting chorus that nicely scuffs up your Trapper Keeper. Early Human League is a reference point, as is OMD, China Crisis, maybe even Flock of Seagulls, all filtered through the haze of a cold high school morning.

Sonically its all there, from the sublime guitars part that sound like My Bloody Valentine, the birds chirping backwards sound, the chorus, of “Somebody loves you shadows”, whispered across the halls of our imagined high school like a rumor floating from the quads to the commons.

And my god is the sequence on this record perfect, for just as the sweet airy chorus of “Kim &Jessie” hits us, after a brief return to instrumental vintage electronic music, “Graveyard Girl” comes next with an opening not unlike New Order’s “Ceremony”. With a strident drum sound giving way to the opening of one of the best melodies of the year, the guitars, synthesizers, and the bucolic vocals talk about high school and seems to control the plot, who told what to whom and how the are all connected by this “Graveyard Girl.”

“Graveyard Girl” is all told through the canvas of a really great Echo and the Bunnymen song smoked through an ethereal filter, the synthesizers overlapping into guitars, driving home the dreamy days and nights, when the sky seemed as tall and endless as the person you chose to sit next to until long after dark. Then the narrative switches, and we hear this Graveyard Girl actually step out and reveal herself.

“I’m going to jump the walls and run… I won’t miss them… I’ll read poetry to the stars… waiting for someone to love me… I’m fifteen years old and already I feel like its already too late to live… don’t you?”

That moment in particular captures the cant wait to grow up, cant wait to get out of here feeling of adolescence, of loving everything too much until it hurts. It all makes for one of the best songs of the year, wrapped in my own memories of High School, the sounds all tumbled together, with the alienation of rejection in a disappointing prom night, barely graduating, the t-shirts and haircuts, promises and lies, all of my youth heavy and traumatic served up in delicate layers of froth and steam, electronics and breathy vocals.

From there we venture into instrumental territory, a fizzy tribute to New Order in “Coloures”. And in this scene we could be at the Prom, the haircuts refined and defined by Flock of Seagulls, the punks in the corner with mohawks, chains and those skeleton Misfits logos running up their arms.

“Up” gives us a glimpse, a come down in the form of a lost 80s FM radio classic.

“We own the sky” is a kind of overly ambitious anthem where droning keyboards show the cars lined up at the impromptu park party, the one where the cops brought out the police spotlight across cars where teenagers crouch on the ground and sip beer out of red cups.

“7AM, dusty road, I’m going to drive until it burns my bones” Declares the narrator at the start of “Highway of Endless Dreams” the voice sounds like our Graveyard Girl, after she’s moved past the graveyard, and wants escape so badly she can feel it in the way the song creeps up and folds over it self, perpetuating motion, as we can see the suburban landscapes giving way to mountain ranges, receding ice packs, state borders, highway patrol cars and shimmering coastlines.

All of this is meant to accompany a listener’s interpretation of the 1980s, and how each year the music changed, and sometimes it brought you closer to someone, and sometimes the songs were like a kegger, the voices and faces and personalities blurring together to the endless techno beat blotted out by kegs of Natural Light. And as the eighties looked out over the precipice into the nineties, to the Acid House movement, we feel like we’re right in that pocket, watching the sun go down.

“Dark Moves of Love” with its rising chorus out of a cloud of guitar and keyboard tells our imaginary high school that its not too late, because they like just broke up like yesterday, calling our hero to action to traipse across the campus to where she is, over to the art room, and maybe when he goes through the circular tube that is the entrance to the print room. And she was in there, her face framed by the half waterfall of blonde hair, head cocked back just so, and this was falling in love for the first time. Because being sixteen, seventeen its like you’ve already missed your chance.

With the teacher far away, it was just her and him and being alive then meant living forever and he is you and you had to settle for the red lights and the image of you two coming up under the fixer in the photo room. An image taken last Saturday at the park, where she leaned onto your shoulder, and the synthesizers kicked in slowly like they do in the final song “Midnight Souls Still Remain”.

In this song, memories of High School fade in a long slow dissolve (11 minutes) to the present, looking back at who we were then, an older image, one in the bottom of your drawer. a photo you made in that dark room that day, an image burned into photo paper clinging to the bottom of the fixer tray.