Listenings: M83, Nine Inch Nails, 65daysofstatic

Picked up three albums last week:

• M83 – Saturdays=Youth
• Nine Inch Nails – Ghosts I-IV
• 65daysofstatic – The Fall of Math

First is M83’s latest work, the evocatively vibrant Saturdays=Youth. Anthony Gonzalez’s new direction with this album was quite well documented in the leadup to its release, so it came as no surprise to me to hear aspects popular in the 80s shine through, conveying Gonzalez’s own fond reflection on his adolescent years. With this album, gone, for the most part, are the towering, apocalyptically urgent soundscapes that dominated earlier album releases Before the Dawn Heals Us and Dead Cities, Red Seas & Lost Ghosts. Saturdays=Youth takes a turn for greater structure and attention to form, with far greater lyrical presence than prior releases.

While the greater use of vocals is a fantastic addition in some tracks, such as the icey ‘Skin of the Night’, and the wonderfully dreamy ‘Graveyard Girl’, it could be a matter of vocal overload. Gonzalez’s voice, while not at all offensive in any sense, suffers from a lack of range and variation, and it is perhaps for this reason that otherwise capable tracks such as ‘We Own the Sky’ fade into the wallpaper of the album. It is for this reason that one of the only two purely instrumental tracks on this album, and the first single ‘Couleurs’ stands out so much. A beautifully constructed track that, while focussing on the ambience that built the M83 name, doesn’t aim to reach the stratospheres as with the previous albums. Instead, we are smothered by a consistent, concerted blanket of sound that evokes images of exactly what its title promises. It is here that Gonzalez’s maturity and prowess as a musician and technician shine through greatest.

On the whole, Saturdays=Youth represents a coming of age for Gonzalez. The album takes a new direction that affords M83 the ’shoegaze’ tag more than any other previous release, but in a more dreamy sense that diverges from the electronic wall of noise first explored in Dead Cities. While not perfectly consistent throughout, it’s a thoroughly enjoyable ride back in time that can only serve more credit to the already revered M83 name.

I’ve only listened to Ghosts I-IV once in full so far, and I think my attention was divided up by work and other such things. You can definitely hear that familiar Nine Inch Nails sound, however, with the metallic, grating feedback, and electronically angular noise. I think what struck me greatest though, is Reznor’s expertise as a technician. He may be in his fourties, and critics may take the viewpoint that he’s lost what made him great, but it is amazing how the T-Rez has managed to take all the new technology that has come up in the past decade and make it his bitch. Sure, people may say that he’s lost what made him what he is, but it could just be that he has found what will make him great. I need to give it a few more proper listens to be able to pass judgment on the music itself, but with that, I’m highly impressed by the diversity that Reznor has been able to convey through this latest endeavour.

65daysofstatic’s debut album The Fall of Math which I was so very lucky to find in stores this week for the first time, marks the beginning of a new band’s embrace of so many different elements of music, and subsequent jamming together of said elements. I own their two latest albums, and have played them to the point of redundance, so I’ve been waiting for my chance to get hold of their first for a long time now. As with a great majority of bands lumped into the post-rock genre, 65daysofstatic seem to hold that whole rejection of modern society mantra.

Voiceovers cut in and out of electronic glitches and twitches, guitars slam into automated drums with confidence and certainty that wouldn’t lead you to believe that this is a band’s debut outing into the musical wilderness. But this self-confidence never leads to pretension. ‘Install A Beak In The Heart That Clucks Time In Arabic’ sets the theme for the album, with an ominous bassline and careful, fragile keys, leading into throbbing drums that build with intensity throughout – something we see further explored in later albums. It’s a mature album where it would be so easy to stray into a redundancy created by a genre in which, from a negative viewpoint, there is limited originality to go around, and it’s something definitely worth exploring for those who are disillusioned with the mediocrity that can sometimes smother creativity in these times.