M83
Before the Dawn Heals Us
Mute
· This followup to last year’s overdue North American release of Dead Cities, Red Seas and Lost Ghosts sees Anthony Gonzalez going it alone.
M83 is going to be too much for some people. The arching drama, vocal choirs and spoken dialogue are going to be dismissed as pretentious and ridiculously overwrought. It’s obvious, though, that Parisian Anthony Gonzalez doesn’t care. If last year’s Dead Cities, Red Seas and Lost Ghosts was a basement experiment in angst and gentle healing, Before the Dawn Heals Us is an entire laboratory devoted to grand suffering and redemption.
Relying less heavily on synthesizers, though there’s still plenty of them, and more on live instruments, Gonzalez has found that drama needn’t simply rely on the swelling climax at the end of a track or on the quiet-loud dynamics so easily bent to emotion (though there’s still plenty of that as well). This is the aural equivalent to big-screen heartbreak and the romance of youth, and the naive alienation, pain and euphoria that accompanies it. What is remarkable about Before the Dawn Heals Us isn’t this ambition, but that at times it manages to evoke those teenage emotions with frightening accuracy. And rather than cladding his music in even more of the shoegaze elements that populated Dead Cities…, Gonzalez has stripped away some of that wall of noise, letting both the ’70s prog of Pink Floyd and the pop music of his native France sound through. This isn’t to say it is a masterwork – with too many interstitial and largely meaningless bits, even those of us who can be roused by the melodramatic will find places on the record where it is too much. Gonzalez, while not necessarily repeating himself with this album, is painting himself into a corner, as is made obvious by a couple of songs that go off the rails. There is something to be said, however, for the sheer audacity of a song like "Teen Angst" and the pang of guilty, indulgent self-pity it evokes.
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