Saturdays=Youth | 
| Artist: M83
Label: Mute U.S.
List Price: $14.98
Buy New: $7.34
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Rating:  18 reviews
Sales Rank: 1250
Media: Audio CD
Discs: 1
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.2
Dimensions (in): 5.6 x 4.9 x 0.4
MPN: 69384
UPC: 724596938423
EAN: 0724596938423
ASIN: B00151HZME
Release Date: April 15, 2008
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
Shipping: International shipping available
Condition: factory sealed.
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| Tracks:
| • | You, Appearing | | • | Kim & Jessie | | • | Skin Of The Night | | • | Graveyard Girl | | • | Couleurs | | • | Up! | | • | We Own The Sky | | • | Highway Of Endless Dreams | | • | Too Late | | • | Dark Moves Of Love | | • | Midnight Souls Still Remain |
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| Editorial Reviews:
Album Description
For M83's chief star-gazer Anthony Gonzalez, his youth is something he looks back upon with affection, something that has become the defining theme of his enchanting new album, "Saturdays = Youth" Recorded with Ken Thomas (Sigur Ros, Sugar Cubes, Cocteau Twins, Suede) and Ewan Pearson (Tracey Thorn, The Rapture, Ladytron) "Saturdays = Youth" delivers the rich sonic textures for which M83 is well known - this time with a more focused approach to song structure and form.
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| Customer Reviews: Read 13 more reviews...
 Haunting me April 15, 2008
E. A Solinas (MD USA)
15 out of 20 found this review helpful
M83's music has always been very airy, synthy and vaguely abstract in nature. Very post-rock, very spacey electronica, but not pretentiously so.
But M83 takes a step in another direction "Saturdays = Youth" -- instead we get a tongue-in-cheek, vaguely nostaltic expanse of 80s-style teenage angst. There are some jarringly angular moments, but Anthony Gonzalez mostly turns out a pretty, electro-riddled little experience swathed in shoegazer instrumentals and pop melodies.
It opens with a very gentle little piano melody, hesitating as if unsure what to play, and is joined by flickers of ephemeral synth. "It's your face," a woman's breathless voice sings, as a man murmurs gentle in the shimmering wash. The entire thing keeps swirling in on itself like a forming tropical storm, growing more ethereal and incomprehensible by the second.
Now drop all expectations of what this album will be like.
"Kim and Jessie" is a vaguely New Orderish synthpop melody with lots of thudding beats and wailing synth loops. And most of the songs hover in the middle -- rollicking blurry guitarpop, swirling shimmering dance, urgent electronica, spacey balladry dripping with dance rhythms, shoegazer epics that build up to a mountainous climax, and ethereal pianopop smothered in cloudy synth. The finale is a continuous, ten-minute ambient hum that frankly bored me silly.
But it takes until the deliciously tongue-in-cheek "Graveyard Girl" for the intent of this to become clear -- it's a wistful, mocking soundtrack of teenage angst and moodiness. The very serious line ""I'm fifteen years old and I feel it's already too late to live. Don't you?" is deliciously ironic.
Technically it's usually a very bad idea when you fix something that wasn't broke, and Gonzalez appears to be doing that when he revisit the musics and teen movies of the 80s. As a result -- since he does not wholly abandon the spacey electronic/shoegazer sound -- "Saturdays = Youth" is a mesh of different styles, and there are moments where the fusion doesn't work.
But it's quite striking that so many of these songs DO blend together well. We have colourful loops, swirling shimmers, cloudy enveloping waves, and little blips of synth, studded with sharper synth beats. This is all woven togetjer with a lot of gentle piano, and some jangly pop guitar interspersed among the buzzing cycling shoegazer guitar.
Unlike before, vocals take front-and-center positions here -- Gonzalez's soft, processed voice glides through. And Morgan Kibby's high, breathless vocals can add anything from gruesome pathos ("She digs her nails into her naked chest... she pulls back the skin to show her ribs/they twinkle like shooting stars") to the tongue-in-cheek monologue from "Graveyard Girl" ("The cemetery is my home/I want to be a part of it/invisible, even to the night/I will read poetry to the stones/wonder if one day I become one of them").
It takes awhile to really clue in on what M83's intent in "Saturdays = Youth" is, but the band's album is a pretty good fusion of synthpop and shoegazer.
 A Brilliantly-Executed New Wave Revival! April 15, 2008
Cale E. Reneau (Conroe, Texas United States)
9 out of 10 found this review helpful
M83's Anthony Gonzalez has always embraced the epic nature of his songs. When browsing through his catalog of amazing songs, you start to realize that his best are always the ones that build into grand displays of what electronic music can be with the right person behind the synth keys. On, Saturdays=Youth, Gonzalez is expanding this idea by introducing an increased importance placed on songwriting and pop sensibilities. The album is, by all accounts, a new wave album in the purest sense of the genre. Recalling the best work of groups like New Order, Flock of Seagulls, or Depeche Mode, Gonzalez has created what could possibly be his most impressive album to date.
Saturdays=Youth plays out like the long-lost soundtrack to a John Hughes movie (actually cited by Anthony as an inspiration for the album), or a bonus CD for Donnie Darko. The scene pictured on the album cover should back me up on this. Gonzalez does more than just capture the mood of the cinematic era, however. The majority of the lyrics on the album are just as lovingly cheesy and melodramatic as can be, filled with such poignantly bad lines like "7am/dusty road/I'm going to drive until it burns my bones" or "The cemetary is my home/I want to be a part of it/invisible even to the night/and I'll read poetry to the stars." But these awesomely bad lines hardly distract from the mood of the album; if anything, they enhance it! It's like watching Sixteen Candles all over again!
That's not to say that you had to be around in the 80s to enjoy this though. I'm too young to remember anything from that era, and everything I know about it is second hand (Anthony, himself, is only 26). Still, I've found Saturdays=Youth to be an enchanting album. In the past, M83 has been about these really deep synth-heavy songs that build and build and assault your eardrums with pure electronic bliss. This album is a much softer, spread-out experience. There's never a sound that is too harsh or commanding, despite the fact that every song is built upon several layers of different synthetic instruments. Album opener, "You, Appearing," for example, never ventures beyond a simple piano line and atmospheric synth harmonies.
"Kim & Jessie," meanwhile, starts out of the gate with heavy drums and a blast-from-the-past synth lead that should totally be the intro song to some 80s throwback film, like Tears for Fears' "Head Over Heals" on the aforementioned Donnie Darko. "Skin of the Night" is a brilliantly sexy tune with shrill female vocals. She sings, "She digs her nails into her naked chest/miles of veins fan out like a road map/she pulls back the skin to show her ribs/that twinkle like shooting stars." It's pretty decent "mood" music for anyone who happens to still be living in 1985. "Graveyard Girl" replaces a lot of the keyboards for guitars, and the overall feel is unlike anything else the album has to offer. Gonzalez does manage to throw in some vocal synths, however; you know, the choral sounds on a keyboard that never get used? To be able to make them sound cool, to me, is a great sign of talent.
Possibly the greatest thing about Saturdays=Youth is that everything feels familiar despite the fact that this is all original material. There are not very many artists out there today who share Anthony's love for 80s new wave music and bring that love out in their music; so being able to hear a fairly stellar recreation of it is entirely welcomed. It should go without saying that many M83 fans may feel disenfranchised with the new approach that Gonzalez is taking to creating music. There are only a few moments on the album that sound like they could've been on another one of his works. "Couleurs," is clearly one of them, as is "Dark Moves of Love." Beyond that, however, this is completely new territory; both for Gonzalez and his fans. Personally, though I enjoyed his past albums almost without exception, Saturdays=Youth seems like the culmination of his work; an album that will not die out after a handful of listens, but one that will continue to receive plays for years. New wave is not my favorite of genres, to be honest, but this is an album that I simply cannot get enough of! I highly recommend it to anyone who wants to relive the 80s, or at least be reminded of their better musical moments.
Key Tracks:
1. "Kim & Jessie"
2. "Skin of the Night"
3. "Graveyard Girl"
4. "Up!"
5. "We Own the Sky"
9 out of 10 Stars
Saturdays=Youth April 15, 2008
Mike Newmark (Tarzana, CA United States)
5 out of 6 found this review helpful
M83's sole core member, Anthony Gonzalez, calls Saturdays=Youth his paean to being a teenager and the discovery that comes with it. In fact, I've always linked M83's music to that volatile period of time, no matter how Gonzalez intended for me to hear it. The flagrantly synthetic drones on Dead Cities, Red Seas and Lost Ghosts (2003) and the exploding circuits on Before the Dawn Heals Us (2005) resembled cascades of emotion pouring out after years of repression. There's a subtle but perceptible hint of violence rumbling at the bottom of songs like "In Church" and "On a White Lake, Near a Green Mountain" that would erupt if only it could make it past the layers of heaving synths that crush it. With an impossibly expansive sound and an inclination to remain in a perpetual state of emotional release, M83's discography is a terrifyingly close aural approximation of--to borrow one of his song titles--"Teen Angst."
On Saturdays=Youth, Gonzalez aims to transport us to a happier place, to cut out the garbage and the herky-jerky experiences that inevitably populated our youth. "I loved being a teenager," Gonzalez explains in the album's press release, "That's when I discovered music and started to take drugs and party with my friends." However we spent our Saturdays as teenagers, they were respites from the drudgery of the rest of the week, when we could cut our teeth on being young in a big, beautiful world. Working with coveted producers Ken Thomas and Ewan Pearson (the latter of whom is responsible for some of the most joyous remixes of the decade) to bring that respite back into our consciousness, Gonzalez more than delivers, not only making us nostalgic for the past, but even filling in the gaps of what may have never been.
Saturdays=Youth is M83's most conceptually loaded record, but it also features his most manageable songs--easy to digest and easier to love. I know fans who didn't care for Before the Dawn Heals Us, perhaps because of its tart flavors and a few tracks that were jammed in neutral, but Saturdays=Youth remains sweet-sounding and elated throughout. It begins with "You Appearing," a dramatic introduction that starts with a simplistic piano line and ends with blossoming synths and hypnotic vocals, as though Gonzalez were documenting the point at which the possibilities of the teen years are first revealed. Next comes "Kim & Jessie," M83's most elemental pop song to date. Lyrics have always been incidental to the effect of M83's music, but I love the tension in Gonzalez's words: "Kim and Jessie / They have a secret world in the twilight." What will they do in that world? The song's tone suggests that whatever happens will make the titular characters feel young, free and alive. Even when the songs contain a shade of mystery, as on "Skin of the Night," they seem to be traveling toward someplace unequivocally wonderful.
Though Gonzalez was actually a teenager in the '90s (he's 26), it was important to him that Saturdays=Youth channeled '80s synth-pop bands such as Depeche Mode and Tears for Fears. And while "Up!" and the album's first single "Couleurs" sport an undeniable '80s fetish, the dominant influence on Saturdays=Youth is still early-'90s British shoegaze, as it has been on all of M83's previous records. The spirit of Cocteau Twins, Pale Saints and My Bloody Valentine hang over Saturdays=Youth like guardian angels, especially on "Graveyard Girl," "We Own the Sky," and the absolutely swoon-worthy "Dark Moves of Love." Shoegaze is both an idealistic and nostalgic genre, refreshingly free of pessimistic overtones, so it would make sense that M83 would tap into it for this record. When all of the instruments pile up and form a tidal wave of unthinkably gorgeous sound, as they do on nearly every song here, it will always bring me back to Kevin Shields trying his very hardest to create the definitive soundtrack to young love.
Before "Dark Moves of Love" even has a chance to finish, the long, sobering drone of the final track, "Midnight Souls Still Remain," takes over and we're suddenly back within a corporeal reality. It's at this point that the unabashed joy and freedom of being a teenager transitions into young adulthood, with its responsibilities, limitations, and awareness of mortality. Knowing how M83 conceptualized his epic closers of the past ("Beauties Can Die," "Lower Your Eyelids to Die with the Sun"), this interpretation would fit, and it's apparent that Gonzalez is thinking about the finiteness of life and the world as much as anyone else in his mid-20's would be. Yet "Midnight Souls Still Remain" may be Gonzalez's way of keeping these memories contained in a kind of box where they can be accessed whenever we feel like revisiting them. After all, Saturdays=Youth isn't the past as we young adults lived it (that would be Limp Bizkit and Masta Ace for me, unfortunately), but as we remember it, and memories can outlive everything else. Our Saturdays and our youth may be long gone, but we can always come back to this.
Good but not great April 15, 2008
Manny Hernandez (Palo Alto, CA)
2 out of 11 found this review helpful
As a follower of their work since Dead Cities, Red Seas & Lost Ghosts, I had high expectations for this M83 album. Though the sound is still there, there aren't the moving musical moments that one experienced in Before the Dawn Heals Us. There is an inevitable New Order feel to many of the songs ("Couleurs" and "We Own The Sky" being two of them), but deep within this is M83 as we know it. It just isn't their best work so far.
Some great tracks: "Kim & Jessie," "Graveyard Girl," "Highway Of Endless Dreams" and the closing track.
Youthful Summers From Our Pasts, Living and Breathing April 20, 2008
John W. Evans (La Grande, OR United States)
2 out of 4 found this review helpful
With "Saturdays = Youth" M83 attempts to evoke the fiery emotions of the adolescent heart throughout, from music to lyrics to packaging. They succeed in crafting a dusky, summer evening album that will provide me with perfect listening for when I contemplate what it was like to be 14 to 17 years old, thinking I was in love but still not knowing how to approach such feelings from any other perspective than that of a child.
This music causes me to think of times in the neighborhood or in the park, particularly those times when the summer evening games of childhood began their evolution into times at once magical, thrilling and terrifying. Something wondrous was happening, and it was all about learning of major changes along the route to adulthood. The subtle undercurrents of sexual tension and longing that permeate "Saturdays = Youth" remind of things I have not felt for years, therefore I find this CD invigorating.
If you like lush electronic musical textures with subtle guitars here and there, soft-edged vocals and some heady grooves you will probably enjoy the way this album sounds. There are few moments of panic here. It is for the most part pastoral and relaxing, but it is nonetheless full of adrenaline due to the inner tension created through the way the music has been written and played.
M83 leader Anthony Gonzalez likes to write about youth, and I believe this album represents not only the band's most musically focused work to date, but also its most focused work in terms of emotions; he and M83 help lost memories of youth come alive. When I was in my early-mid teens, popular music sounded a lot different than what I hear on this disc, but M83 captures some of those past emotions for me. After all, such feelings never really die. If you look far enough down inside, you will find such feelings still hiding, asking to be let out. "Saturdays = Youth" may help you bring some of these feelings up for air. Listen to this CD, and let your feelings breathe.
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