Record Review

M83

Saturdays = Youth
(Mute; 2008)

Rating: 84%
Combined Rating: 82%

If we assume that shoegaze is essentially the sum of a formula that tweaks ambient, pop, dance, and ’80s studio technique, and that it was simultaneously invented and perfected with the release of Loveless (1991), then our assumptions leave the genre emaciated without hope of progressing except into genres already staked by others. As proof positive, in the nearly two decades since Loveless‘s release even favorites of the stable of bands most influenced by the album’s sonic resonance—Mogwai, Serena-Maneesh, and new kids No Age—are still nowhere near synthesizing textural diversity and melodic superiority to the degree that Loveless does. And I suspect that with the release of My Bloody Valentine’s long-awaited follow up, the best even Shields and company can hope for is unmarred emulation of their own creative apex, which is now and forever concretized into canon. Shoegaze was a ping off guitar pop’s armored core. I think Boogz put it best: when asked “what is shoegaze?” he responded simply, “bands that sound like MBV.”

Which isn’t to suggest that the genre is a dead horse, but simply that it’s difficult to knowingly do anything new with it while also acknowledging both the dominance of its most obvious referent and the way shoegaze is so straightforwardly a mix of genres. Isn’t Loveless‘s “When You Sleep” just the Temptations with an Shondel-rough edge, magnified and tortured into shivering immediacy by studio gimmickry with the subtlety of a Michael Bay movie? Won’t it be included in 2025’s Nuggets Vol. 30 box set? Because Dead Cities, Red Seas and Lost Ghosts literally copied Loveless‘s interspersing of ambient tracks between shimmering pop testimonies, and Before the Dawn Heals Us amped the pop side of that formula to vainglorious, cinematic heights via recited dialogue and overcooked drama, I feared that the now solo Anthony Gonzalez’s Saturdays = Youth, if only for its profoundly bad title, would push shoegaze into satire’s sandbox. Believe it or not, emo used to be a respected genre too, long before it became a punch line.

Thankfully Gonzalez had to the good sense to do exactly what he needed to do: make a Cocteau Twins album rather than a Jesus and Mary Chain album sampled in redux for a Godzilla remake. A tribute to adolescence in all of its naïve passion, Saturdays = Youth might be the most fearless album I’ve heard so far this year, not for being unabashedly experimentalist, which it certainly isn’t, so much as being unafraid to leave itself open to the slings of age-wrought cynicism. The album is a familiar array of sounds with no shortage of ’80s bands to act as footnote, but I hear an addendum to shoegaze’s long-stagnant prescription to literal obfuscation behind dynamic extremism. The guts and sinew of shoegaze’s core, unrefined and silly and sincere as they are, are bared with all of the temerity of high school poetry, the genre’s pretensions ripped away to reveal the ’80s pop record we all already knew was there.

Repetition belies subtlety, the minute gestures of a palpable production expertise. Each song is lovingly and patiently crafted to near-perfect length, with a tuneful ear for dynamics and each instrument’s inherent resonance. “You, Appearing” and “Skin of the Night” begin with the single strikes of a piano chord, but the recurrence of a vocal line, a technique repeated throughout much of the album, then elevates each song to higher places. I’ve heard criticism that Saturdays = Youth is essentially a collection of songs that cycle two chords over pervasive wash, but I think that it’s this repetition that puts Gonzales’ ability to explore the deviations available in limited confines on display. He’s also simultaneously delivering the music to a place to where Mogwais and Spiritualizeds roam with brontosaurus gait—a place of giant, mantra-like fuzz where the spark of an idea, like the drama of teenage everydays, are transformed into traumatic, earth shattering events. It’s also difficult to ignore that “Kim and Jessie” and “Graveyard Girl” are two additions to M83’s surprisingly deep catalogue of catchy singles. As much as I love them, Serena-Maneesh only have one “Un-deux” in them so far.

It’s hard not to follow one’s instincts to cringe at lines like “She digs her nails into a naked chest,” or the seemingly Sophia Coppola-penned monologue in which the perpetual teenager/subject says, with pensive effusiveness, that “I’m just waiting for someone to kiss me,” and “I’m fifteen years old and I feel it’s already too late to live.” (Both from first single “Graveyard Girl,” a song that also sounds tailor-made to be danced to by Kirsten Dunst in a Coppola trailer.) But the album demands a purposeful surrender to a juvenile tunnel vision. Where I differentiate between this and groups like Born Ruffians or These New Puritans, whom I’ve lambasted for shortsighted youthfulness, is that the latter’s teenagedness is detectable from the naiveté of their statements, whereas here the naiveté of these statements is derived from their preset thesis, and are thus subsequent to self-knowingness and purpose. As a tribute to his teenage years, Gonzales has given M83 fans and new listeners alike an experience both personal and easily shared—nigh universal in a marketplace where the cult of the personality and celebrity make the best “storytelling” a fractured product marketed at a specific subculture.

The drums are once again stadium sized, with “Kim and Jessie” replacing the too-long drum rolls of “Don’t Save Us from the Flames” with off-time tom strikes and lovably theatrical synths. “Couleurs” is an instrumental, techno display of literate songwriting that manages to stay between the lines of the album’s thematic overtones while acting as the track listing’s necessary departure. There is the failure of “Up!”—the one instance (with which no M83 record would be complete) where overwrought production becomes a distraction rather than a means. But “Up!” is an exception to an otherwise supremely balanced and tenderly crafted addition to both the pop and shoegaze canon, one in which the arbitrary lines drawn between those two are made, however temporarily, transparent.

It’s something to say that any album with so literally a stated reason for being becomes a de facto concept record, a something that’s being bandied around as readily as M83’s many ’80s and cinematic precedents. I prefer to see Gonzales’ tribute as an ostentatious, unpretentious, and candid portrayal. Of course it’s cheeseball, as we all were at that age. But that’s ultimately what makes this accessible, highly-listenable album a reinvigoration of both catalogue and genre. Shoegaze is still hiding behind its noncommittal subjugation to noise and the irrefutable bible of Loveless‘s supposed perfection. Saturdays = Youth isn’t exactly stupid, but it’s the wonderful paradox of a knowing naiveté that then allows Gonzales to be so unapologetically himself.

:: Visit the artist’s Myspace