posted 04/01/2007 (Sun) @ 11:25 am
>>> Music Reviews
M83 - Before the Dawn Heals Us (2005)
Blade Runner… without the blades or the running.
- Moon Child
- Don’t Save Us from the Flames
- In the Cold I’m Standing
- Farewell/Goodbye
- Fields, Shorelines and Hunters
- *
- I Guess I’m Floating
- Teen Angst
- Can’t Stop
- Safe
- Let Men Burn Stars
- Car Chase Terror
- Slight Night Shiver
- Guitar and a Heart
- Lower Your Eyelids to Die With the Sun
Let’s define beauty. There’s a couple types. There’s “as beautiful as a rock in a cop’s face” beauty, and there’s also “frilly dresses, makeovers, and rainbows” beauty. One type yields better art. Guess which one.
Sure, it’s possible to mix the two. In fact, it’s encouraged. But that hasn’t happened with this record. For all the pompous audacity of comparing this to My Bloody Valentine, there is no edge to “Before the Dawn Heals Us.” Where Loveless suggests an entire organic spectrum of emotion, with a tenderized heart hiding behind the depressive and angry gloom of white noise guitars, M83’s dry, soulless drum machines and keyboard arrangements miss the mark most of the time. Maybe it’s unfair to compare M83 to a defining record of the ’90s.
Huh. Maybe so.
Most insipid is “Farewell/Goodbye,” which brings to mind the Blade Runner score as composed by an interior decorator. It’s a damn long goodbye, too, clocking in at 5:32’s worth of repetitive synth pad swells, faux theremin, and whispered melodrama. The only people tasteless enough to actually want to listen to this likely run planetariums and wear turtleneck sweaters with rainbow embroidery.
Something like “Unrecorded” (from M83’s Dead Cities, Red Seas & Lost Ghosts) managed a drifty, spaced-out vibe with enough musical variation to keep things interesting. They repeat that success here somewhat with “*” and perhaps “Don’t Save Us From the Flames,” although neither song can claim the mesmeric quality of “Unrecorded,” or of other shoegaze groups they get lumped in with. Try the latest Amusement Parks on Fire record for a pleasant mixture of beauty with volume.
The endlessly slow swells of synthesized strings and woodwinds here bring to mind space at its cheesiest, composition at its nadir, and people watching the Discovery channel in awe without ever detouring to look up the source material. Don’t save this one from the flames. Chuck it toward the sun. If the aliens find it instead of the Bach we sent them, they’ll assume we’re all interior decorators.
