Track Listing

1. You Appearing
2. Kim And Jessie
3. Skin Of The Night
4. Graveyard Girl
5. Couleurs
6. Up
7. We Own The Sky
8. Highway Of Endless Dreams
9. Too Late
10. Dark Moves Of Love
11. Midnight Souls Still Remain

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #2529 in Music
• Released on: 2008-04-14
• Number of discs: 1

Album Description
For M83's chief star-gazer Anthony Gonzalez, his youth is something he looks back upon with affection, something that has become the defining theme of his enchanting new album, Saturdays=Youth. Saturdays=Youth is his most explicit celebration yet of how it feels to be dazed, confused and 15 years old. "Saturday is definitely the coolest day of the week for a teenager and that's the reason Saturday is in the title," he says, as if it needed explaining. "Saturday always reminds everyone of their youth". Saturdays = Youth delivers the rich sonic textures for which M83 is well known -this time with a more focused approach to song structure and form.

Customer Reviews

Remeber the 80's
Talk talk, Human League, Soft Cell, Tubeway Army and OK more up to date Air. They are all in here and you won't listen to a more catchy and wistful album all year. However by the end you may well have had enough so lose astar for that, but I hate to say it this could be equally well received at a thirteen year old girl's birthday party or at a middle aged dinner party.

Go figure!

The French can write dreamy electronics!
When I heard the magestic 'We own the Sky' with it's enchanting 'Frazier Chorus' type vocals and sweeping synths, I thought "Woaah, who is this?"
On buying the album, I was a bit put off by the moody looking students on the cover. I thought surely it's not this miserable lot?
I found out thankfully it wasn't. Looking at the album credit's. I noticed a certain Tom Bailey in there. Could that be 'The Thompson Twins' lead singer and musician involved in this I wonder.
There is a couple of songs sang sweetly by a female which are okay. But it's mostly sung by multi-instrumentalist Anthony Gonzalez.
I think the main strengths are his dreamy type vocals with piano and string type synths. The quieter songs have some loverly melodies.
My standout tracks are 'You, Appearing', 'Graveyard Girl' which has a dreamy type sampled vocal in the middle, Obviously 'We own the Sky' with it's great build up.
Another favourite and which I cannot stop playing is the romantic 'Too Late'. It sounds so beautiful in places with it's piano and synths.
'Midnight souls still remain' is a strange 11 minute instrumental. It is basically one key pressed on keyboard with other bits added. Very trance like. This track is best played be fore 'We own the Sky'
If the rest of the album were like these five tracks, including a better cover. I would have given it five rating.

Haunting me

M83's music has always been very airy, synthy and vaguely abstract in nature. Very post-rock, very spacey electronica, but not pretentiously so.

But M83 takes a step in another direction "Saturdays = Youth" -- instead we get a tongue-in-cheek, vaguely nostaltic expanse of 80s-style teenage angst. There are some jarringly angular moments, but Anthony Gonzalez mostly turns out a pretty, electro-riddled little experience swathed in shoegazer instrumentals and pop melodies.

It opens with a very gentle little piano melody, hesitating as if unsure what to play, and is joined by flickers of ephemeral synth. "It's your face," a woman's breathless voice sings, as a man murmurs gentle in the shimmering wash. The entire thing keeps swirling in on itself like a forming tropical storm, growing more ethereal and incomprehensible by the second.

Now drop all expectations of what this album will be like.

"Kim and Jessie" is a vaguely New Orderish synthpop melody with lots of thudding beats and wailing synth loops. And most of the songs hover in the middle -- rollicking blurry guitarpop, swirling shimmering dance, urgent electronica, spacey balladry dripping with dance rhythms, shoegazer epics that build up to a mountainous climax, and ethereal pianopop smothered in cloudy synth. The finale is a continuous, ten-minute ambient hum that frankly bored me silly.

But it takes until the deliciously tongue-in-cheek "Graveyard Girl" for the intent of this to become clear -- it's a wistful, mocking soundtrack of teenage angst and moodiness. The very serious line ""I'm fifteen years old and I feel it's already too late to live. Don't you?" is deliciously ironic.

Technically it's usually a very bad idea when you fix something that wasn't broke, and Gonzalez appears to be doing that when he revisit the musics and teen movies of the 80s. As a result -- since he does not wholly abandon the spacey electronic/shoegazer sound -- "Saturdays = Youth" is a mesh of different styles, and there are moments where the fusion doesn't work.

But it's quite striking that so many of these songs DO blend together well. We have colourful loops, swirling shimmers, cloudy enveloping waves, and little blips of synth, studded with sharper synth beats. This is all woven togetjer with a lot of gentle piano, and some jangly pop guitar interspersed among the buzzing cycling shoegazer guitar.

Unlike before, vocals take front-and-center positions here -- Gonzalez's soft, processed voice glides through. And Morgan Kibby's high, breathless vocals can add anything from gruesome pathos ("She digs her nails into her naked chest... she pulls back the skin to show her ribs/they twinkle like shooting stars") to the tongue-in-cheek monologue from "Graveyard Girl" ("The cemetery is my home/I want to be a part of it/invisible, even to the night/I will read poetry to the stones/wonder if one day I become one of them").

It takes awhile to really clue in on what M83's intent in "Saturdays = Youth" is, but the band's album is a pretty good fusion of synthpop and shoegazer.