On October 14, 2011, the new M83 album "Hurry Up, We’re Dreaming" was released
2CD, 2Vinyl, Download [Naïve / Indigo]
Creating something truly grand is actually not that difficult. Queen’s “Bohemian Rhapsody,” Pink Floyd’s “Comfortably Numb,” Harry Nilsson’s “Without You,” Jimmy Webb’s “MacArthur Park,” Guns N’ Roses’ “Sweet Child o’ Mine”... rock history is filled with absurd and megalomaniacal songs that are often bloated and overloaded, songs that are known as emotional signposts without actually communicating real emotion. These grandiose recordings may be impressive - but filling a piece that triggers an overwhelming neural short circuit with genuine emotionality, i.e., making it memorable for reasons other than gigantism, is much more difficult.
This is a talent that Anthony Gonzalez has clearly mastered with the double album “Hurry Up, We’re Dreaming”: a recording that represents a brilliant negotiation between the seemingly conflicting demands of commercial pop and experimental rock, and includes some truly gigantic recordings. Gonzalez, who hails from Antibes on the French Riviera, has been steadily working to perfect the art of bombastic alternative pop since founding M83 in 2001. The debut album “M83,” released the same year, and the follow-up “Dead Cities, Red Seas & Lost Ghosts,” released two years later, established him as a heavyweight in the post-rock bliss-pop cosmos-electronica league: a gifted producer of hazy, fantastically layered, irresistibly narcotic, epic dreamscapes, created (mostly solo) from distorted electronica, plush synthesizers, murmured vocals, and effects-laden guitar.
The third album “Before the Dawn Heals Us” (2005) emphasized the cinematic, star-speckled foreground but also added a dark strangeness. In 2007, M83 released the entirely ambient-produced “Digital Shades Vol. 1.” Then came “Saturday = Youth” in 2008, a work soaked in nostalgia from Gonzalez’s teenage years, which unabashedly celebrated artists like Kate Bush and Jean-Michel Jarre, paving the way for the monumental “Hurry Up, We’re Dreaming.”
The recording, co-produced by bassist Justin Meldal-Johnsen (known for his work with Beck, NIN, The Mars Volta) and mixed by Tony Hoffer (Air, Kooks), took 13 months. Guest vocalists include Zola Jesus (on “intro”) and Brad Laner (“Splendor”), as well as contributions from Gonzalez’s brother Yann. Gonzalez’s decision to record a double album with 22 tracks is the result of a youth shaped by The Beatles’ “White Album,” Pink Floyd’s “Ummagumma,” and Smashing Pumpkins’ “Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness.” “Artists who have attempted something as huge as a double album have always been an inspiration for me,” he explains. “It’s a lot of work, but I always wanted to achieve something like this one day, and it felt like the right time for me now.”
The ironically contradictory title is a reference to a loosely used theme of dreams and memories, both of which took on a larger place in Gonzalez’s life after he moved to Los Angeles in January 2010. “The first three months were very hard,” he shares. “I felt lonely in my apartment while working on the album, and - I really don’t know why - I started to remember my childhood. That made me - in a good way - nostalgic, and I recalled some of my dreams as a child - nothing very concrete, more the feeling. I then thought that this would be a good concept for the album. It’s a retrospective of my life, from childhood through teenage years to adulthood.” These memories appear particularly explicitly in two tracks: “Raconte-Moi Une Histoire” (when he was 5 years old, his mother often bought him a children’s magazine with the same title, which had a cassette of fairy tales attached to the cover) and “OK Pal,” in which Gonzalez recalls an episode from his teenage years, “when you first meet someone who really understands you” …
Web:
Only M83 concert in Germany:
November 28, 2011 Berlin – Gretchen
Video / Audio:
“Echoes” Video Teaser:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mU6TB8jet-Q
M83 'Midnight City' audio
