M83’s Before the Dawn Heals Us
A radical proposition: let’s stop making fun of the French. “Cheese-eating surrender monkeys,” however clever it might have been at first, is old and played out; that whole “Freedom fries” thing was way overrated as humor and as an insult. Besides, any culture that can throw out anything as good an album as M83’s new Before the Dawn Heals Us clearly has something going for it.
M83 throws everything they’ve got at you: spiraling guitars, percussive drums and weird synthesizers. They switch moods as fast as they switch riffs; going from post-apocalyptic pastoral landscapes to full power–Oh hell, I’m just going to say it: It’s a concept album about nuclear war.
“Fields, Shorelines and Hunters” starts out as a just a simple bass drum beat underneath a few synthesizers, eventually devolving into a burst of static. The weird, NES boss-battle riff that starts out track six (alternatively named by the Atari logo, an asterisk and, on my iTunes, “6.”) disappears almost immediately in a mess of guitars and drums that themselves disappear to a fast paced beat seconds later, then come back underneath some synthesizers that can only be described as “soaring.” And then the next track, “I Guess I’m Floating,” takes all of that away for the sounds of children playing on a school playground and a series of short three-note sequences that provide some constancy over bass that ebbs and flows. And then it’s back into Nintendo level music again.
But it’s later in the album–as it flows into “Teen Angst” and “Safe” and “Let Men Burn Stars”–that the nuclear war thing–okay, maybe I’m reading too much into this–really pops up. “Falling stars exploding on the sea / God it’s beautiful! / The land and the roses slowly disappeared,” sings Anthony Gonzales on “Safe,” and then “A wounded angel is smiling at me,” as the synthesizers swell back up. It makes more sense listening to it than reading a descriptions of it. On “Teen Angst,” he sings “The planet is dying.”
So yeah, there’s an element of cheese-eating: the synthesizers get ridiculous at a couple of points, and the lyrics–especially the female vocals in “Moonchild” and “Car Chase Terror!”–take a little time to grow on you. That “Car Chase Terror!” is supposed to be a dialogue between a mother and daughter fleeing Satan, but are both voiced by the same vocalist, doesn’t make it any easier to understand.
But M83 never lets you get comfortable with just a simple riff unless it’s buried under lots of other stuff. For that reason, it doesn’t have the warmth of Air’s Talkie Walkie, or even the Virgin Suicides soundtrack. That’s not a particular problem, considering that it’s as powerful in its own right, creating a sense of distance in a way that still encourages engaging with the album. It’s the sort of thing that demands to be listened to on huge, good speakers with the lights turned low. It’s an album that should wash over you like an flowing tide or a nuclear blast. M83 understands that there is beauty in destruction, and throws at it you with force.