M83

Anthony Gonzalez, a.k.a. M83, has a preternatural ear for the sound of cinema. His music has been used in C.S.I. Miami, a Britney Spears documentary and Gossip Girl, and he’s also created soundtracks for less commercial projects. M83 has approached previous albums with a visible directorial framework: Dead Cities, Red Seas and Lost Ghosts plays with the rose-tinted euphoria of a 1960s acid flick, and Before the Dawn Heals Us cops the vibe of a comically bad Japanese horror. Songs like “Teen Angst” and “We Own the Sky,” vocal overdubs of tremulous young girls reading from diaries, even the cover art of previous album Saturdays=Youth have all positioned M83 as a flag bearer of the John Hughes teen-drama aesthetic.

But M83 managed to announce even more epic intention with the release of the trailer for new double album, Hurry Up, We’re Dreaming. The one-minute montage of skyscrapers, mountaintops and space looked like an homage to Terrence Malick’s new opus, The Tree of Life, and Gonzalez would later cite the renowned director as an influence. It’s a bold self-comparison, and the heart-on-sleeve ambition is part of M83’s charm. If Hurry Up isn’t nearly as transcendant as its source material, it’s also certain to be less polarizing.

“Intro” commences the album fashionably, with supporting vocals from up-and-comer Zola Jesus as well as a much more prominent vocal presence by Gonzalez himself. An increase in singing is characteristic of the frequent pop numbers that serve to ground the stratospheric instrumental tracks, though both varieties are consistently melodramatic. It turns out Gonzalez is equally able to produce a convincingly earnest pathos with vocals as he is with characteristically huge synths swells and cymbal washes. The decipherable snippets that emerge from a mostly inscrutable mass are mantras—on “Midnight City,” he repeats, “The city is my church!”

At the heights of his power, M83 creates a feeling of divine immanence, like he’s captured teenage lightning—ineffable images and memories of romantic longing, or the unbridled enthusiasm of a constantly expanding young mind. But at times, tracks like “Splendor” border on bathos. The repetition of this maximal strategy without enough elucidation can cheapen the message somewhat, giving the sense that Gonzalez was contracted to create a compilation of tracks for use on television season finales. An even bigger blow, given the high stakes of a double LP, is that its whole doesn’t exceed the sum of its parts. The band deserves more than cursory commendation for trying to outdo themselves, aiming for a career defining statement meant to blast young hearts into oblivion. But Saturdays=Youth already achieved this feat with smaller, more juvenile thrills that only surface occasionally here, on tracks like “OK Pal” and “Raconte-Moi Une Histoire.”

Still, this is high-order scrutiny for an ambitious and prolific young talent. M83 has outlasted the early comparisons to My Blood Valentine and Spiritualized and bested peers like Sigur Ros throughout the past decade. The conclusion is promising: excellent in its own right, Hurry Up, We’re Dreaming leaves the book open on what M83 may yet achieve.