Music Recommendation - Saturdays = Youth

I've always been impressed by professional music journalists who can listen to a new album and determine in just a few days just how good it is. A good review will manage to be multifaceted, incorporating elements that range from the album's potential historical significance (past and future), musical enjoyability, lyrical prowess, technical achievement and so forth. I'm amazed by this because what takes a typical reviewer a few days to see, it takes me often weeks, months, or even years to truly understand the value of a given album.




I'm going to give an example of an album that came out in 2008 by the band M83, an electronic group from France that tends to create rich, complex albums that sound like throwbacks to the great synth-pop albums from the 80s. Their most recent achievement, Saturdays = Youth was released under-the-radar to mixed reviews, though it's interesting to note that Pitchfork was one of the few publications that unabashedly loved it. I was reading Kulterblog in early 2009 as the writers and its readers plastered the website with opinions regarding what they considered to be the best album of the year. I ended up at least sampling the music of which was spoken, and M83 only came up a couple of times.

Upon first listening to the album, I felt a little uncomfortable by the band's unique sound. It reminded me of something that I couldn't put a finger on, and I couldn't decide whether or not it was a good thing or a bad thing. A memory maybe, or perhaps a premonition, I didn't know. I listened to it quite a bit over the next month but I only fell in love with a couple songs. It wasn't until early this year that I began listening to it more and more and really trying to pay attention to the textures, lyrics, and ideas the artists were trying to get across. I now love this album. There aren't enough superlatives in the English language for me to properly describe to you just how good this music is to me. It is at once sexy and romantic, claustrophobic and liberating, dense yet simplistic. The album rewards you based on the effort you give to it. The sound is closer to classical than it is to pop, and yet it feels like the future of the medium.

Check it out if you want an intensely satisfying, though not necessarily easy, listen.


10/10