M83 – Hurry Up, We’re Dreaming (Part 1)

M83’s Hurry Up, We’re Dreaming doesn’t come out until October 18th, but the damn thing is so epic, we had to get an early jump on it. Brandon enlists the help of Chris Atto and André Salas to break down this double disc follow-up to the spectacular Saturdays=Youth.

You can download “Midnight City” in MP3 form, and check out tour dates, at ilovem83.com.

From: Brandon Hall
To: Chris Atto, André Salas

Well. Looks like my fall just got soundtracked. And apparently my fall is going to be epic!

Anthony Gonzalez’s sixth album as M83, Hurry Up, We’re Dreaming, is his follow up to the brilliant, critically-acclaimed, heart wrenching, and heart-wrenchingly beautiful Saturdays=Youth. If you can’t tell, I was a big fan of that one. Hurry Up, We’re Dreaming is his grand statement, double album to be put alongside Prince’s Sign ‘O’ The Times, Smashing Pumpkins’ Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness, the Beatles White Album, Guns ‘N’ Roses Use Your Illusion, etc. Not that it sounds like any of these albums, just that it’s huge and grand and somewhat of a rite of passage for an artist who trades in epic scale and has garnered enough clout and popularity to warrant such an undertaking.

Regardless of the fact that this is a double album, its run time is a much less harrowing 72 minutes – certainly short enough to fit on a single album, though given the scope and variance of each of its 22 songs, I’m honestly grateful it was broken up into two LPs. Turns out there’s a deeper reason for the split than ease of consumption. I’ll let Gonzalez explain it himself:

“The cover has a brother and a sister sitting in a bed. One side is the spirit of the young boy, and the other side is the spirit of the young girl. It’s like how brothers and sisters are different people, but connected by blood and mind. Each track has a sibling on the other disc.”

I read this about a solid week into listening to nothing but this album and it’s yet another trick in a bag so jam packed full of them I can hardly keep track. That is to say, I think this is awesome! It gives a shape and form to the album I hadn’t noticed before. And sure enough, upon closer examination, every track on the first disc does match up beautifully with its counterpart on the second.

Allow me to match them up for you:

Gonzalez has spent the better part of three years working on this album. He even left his home in the South of France to live in Los Angeles, which, what!? He’s said in a number of interviews that this double album is somewhat of an amalgamation of all of his past records, which is kind of undeniable, and, given the album’s size, unsurprising. You can hear a lot of Dead Cities‘ electro-shoegaze, plenty of Saturdays=Youth‘s nostalgic bent, and not a little of Before the Dawn Heals Us’s synthed-out bombast. Furthermore, this album + headphones makes New York City a synthy, spectacular wonderland. I don’t know if I ever want to go anywhere in this city listening to anything else.

There’s a shit ton in this record, so I’m really glad we’re triple teaming this thing. I, for one, can’t look past Saturdays=Youth. Fair or unfair, that album is a classic and its status as such becomes more permanently cemented with each passing year. In trying to recapture the angst and passion and thrill of being a teenager in a John Hughes universe, Gonzalez tapped into something really beautiful and poignant. It was small and sweet, just like the best of John Hughes’ movies, and for that reason was bigger, I’m sure, than anything even Gonzalez had anticipated. But now everything he does has to be reflected in that light, no? How can I ever listen to another M83 album and not want to compare it to Saturdays=Youth?

As wonderful as this album is, I think it genuinely does pale in comparison. And this album is wonderful. Each song is a fucking knockout. But unlike his previous album, I don’t get the impression that these songs fit together to form a greater whole. They’re just really fucking awesome individual songs. Unfortunately, M83 has created a world where we get to expect more than 22 amazing songs that I will be listening to for at least the next three months.

What do you guys think? Am I being unfair, or am I missing something? Do you grasp an overriding theme that I don’t see?

“The city is my church,”
Brandon

Hurry Up, We’re Dreaming is out 10/18 on Mute.

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