Popcorn Noises

M83 - Hurry Up, We’re Dreaming

Anthony Gonzalez and his cohorts don’t seem interested in anything that doesn’t immediately paint the word “EPIC” in neon purple Helvetica across the night sky, do they? They have one setting, and that setting is called “soar.” They soar and soar and soar. And soar. And soar. For 74 minutes. If they’re not soaring, they’re meandering carefully, purposefully toward the next soar moment. I mean, soaring is fun, right? The purpose of this music is to body and simultaneously eviscerate the world-crushing emotions of teenagers. That’s what Gonzalez’s last album, Saturdays = Youth, was all about and it was pretty dang great. It worked in the same basic breed of stadium synth-gaze that we find on the sprawling Hurry Up, We’re Dreaming, but it was also anchored in a very clear set of images that served as its spiritual guidebook: John Hughes’ romantic teen flicks from the 80s. Cheesy or obvious as it may have been, that pretense also imparted an essential up-front-ness to the album, as if Gonzalez were admitting sheepishly, right off the bat, “Yeah, I know, it sounds like Cocteau Twins. Let’s just go with it. Hey, remember Sixteen Candles?”

So no, pretentious doesn’t always equal stupid / pompous. Sometimes it can be nice to forget yourself and just be washed over by echoing tom-toms and borrowed nostalgia. But sometimes the wires can get crossed, the signifiers and signifieds switch places, and you end up with a double album of big, bright, velvety gestures that just sorta sit there and, well, gesture. My imagined conversation with Gonzalez about Hurry Up (as opposed to Saturdays = Youth’s self-aware quip) would go something like this. He: “Wow! Look at all the stars! Everything’s so beautiful!” Me: “Yup, it sure is.” He: “But I mean WOW! Just look at them! WOOOOOW!” Me: “No yeah, I get it, it’s nice.” He, whispering: “Yeah, wow…wow…” Me: “Okay I’m gonna call a cab and go home now.” I have little patience for this kind of crescendo-obsessed pounding that a lot of people call ‘post-rock’ (a genre whose ranks I think it’s safe to say M83 have joined now), music that swells simply for the sake of swelling. These songs sit heavy with effort—making sure you know that every wash, every chord change, and every downbeat is a monumental labor—and they work themselves into a grand, echoey frenzy, but I never really get the sense that an emotional climax has been earned to match the musical one. Hurry Up signifies a feeling without ever daring to provoke it.

We didn’t need a story, we didn’t need a real world
We just had to keep walking
And we became the stories, we became the places
We were the lights, the deserts, the faraway worlds
We were you before you even existed

These are the rather telling first lines of the album, whispered in a Gollum-y voice by Zola Jesus’ Nika Danilova—who slams the nail in the coffin by busting out her best Bono impression a minute or so later—over buzzy, urgent synthesizers. Considering the purposeful connection to filmic stories on Saturdays, the statement sits like a declaration of intent. And really, as soon as she says “We didn’t need a real world,” the real world gets summarily dumped for the skyward thrust of meaningless abstractions. There’s some business about lights and deserts and existence and whatnot, but who cares when there’s soaring to be done, right? Follow-up single “Midnight City” also squanders its chance at evoking a three-dimensional experience. “Waiting for a car, waiting for a ride in the dark,” sounds angst-y and teenage, doesn’t it? It hints at the essential aimlessness, the sheer and necessary boredom of adolescent life. But being the predictable crescendo junkie that he’s become, Gonzalez can’t help pawning his last scraps of relatability for something that sounds Important: “This city is my church.” Whoops, lost it! During the hour that follows you’ve got children narrating what is supposed to be an endearingly naive and idealistic story about becoming frogs and playing together, but which ends up literally describing a biblical plague covering the earth, some additional mumble-whispering about encountering big purple lights in the desert (See? Told you.), and lots more songs where—get this—M83 start out kinda quiet but then they gradually get louder (!) to look forward to.

But wait, isn’t it unfair to castigate Gonzalez, a non-native English speaker for one thing and someone who’s clearly more interested in musical effect than verbal clout anyway, for having crappy lyrics? And don’t you love your fair share of ‘meaningless abstractions’ disguised as songs? Why yes it is and yes I do! See, it’s the point at which things like crappy lyrics, predictable song arcs, and facsimilized emotions come together under one banner, the banner of Bigness, that Hurry Up, We’re Dreaming fails for me. Tom Ewing talked about the pitfalls of big-sounding music in his recent Poptimist column, about the ways that epic rock can function as a kind of secular gospel music, putting on the trappings of transcendence or transformation but only for the sake of aesthetics. Regardless of your personal fondness for or revulsion to it, you recognize on some level that you are being manipulated by the grandiosity of the music, by the salvation promised—but not delivered—in the epic sweep of it. Other kinds of aesthetic manipulation don’t bother me so much because they don’t purport to mean as much as something like M83. If a band fakes being quaintly twee or ruggedly folky or spacey and futuristic, I’m willing to meet them at least halfway because those sounds don’t usually puff themselves up with hollow grandness. The bigger the sound, the more obvious the dupe, and I don’t like the feeling of being duped.

Like I said earlier, Hurry Up, We’re Dreaming, is about the outsized emotions of teenagers, about how everything feels weighty and eternal when you’re that age. Gonzalez’s synthy squall nails the bigness of it all, but follows in the footsteps of the most eye-rolling epic rock by ignoring the need for real, human substance underneath it. After a few spins you may find yourself in thrall to such wide-eyed sounds, but to stop and question—even for a second—what it actually means is to be confronted with the unintentional flatness of this record. Big sounds have their place, as does teen melodrama, but here M83 do a disservice to both by reaching exclusively for the purple, echoey, low-hanging emotional fruit.