As an MK growing up in Nigeria, I missed the 80s music era even more than most Christian kids did, and so I've ben catching up for the last 10 years or so, though sometimes through the lenses of what you might call "80s revival bands" like The Mary Onnettes. Add m83 to my 80s instructors. This new album from them is pure 80s mopey synth-rock. What it really reminds me of is Tears for Fears, only with less focus on the vocals and more on the soaring synths.

The first song I heard from this album is "kim & jessie" and it was pretty much on repeat for a week before I got around to getting the whole album. Having listened to the whole album a few times through, I think that this song really encapsulates the idea behind it:



The whole album is this nostalgic look back at youth, this golden, gauzy time bygone era when the world is supposedly your oyster, and if it's not, you have your own "secret world" where it is, and the only thing that matters is you and your girl/boyfriend. It aught to be a cliche to compare this album to Donnie Darko, but the closest thing I can think of is the scene where Donnie and Gretchen are just lying out on the hillside and doom is impending, but it doesn't matter a bit. This sense is repeated in "We Own the Sky":



But underneath it is a sense of menace throughout. The music is nothing if not eerie, not the mention the shadow lurker in the "Kim and Jessie" refrain, and at the end of "We Own the Sky" the repeated mantra: This time that we thought we owned and ruled, youth, is also where we develop all our neuroses. It's so weird how on one hand the stuff that most kids have to deal with is usually so trivial, but at the same time, we (at least, I) were so ill equipped to deal with even those trivial challenges that they became this source of doubt and shame and grief. So, like the cover represents, you have this golden, gauzy era populated by disaffected freaks.

The penultimate song finishes the arc:
This is exactly the point of the album, to bring back youth from the "wrecked and grey ... void" of memory.

Just read the Pitchfork review, and it turns out that most of the stuff that I observed was already mentioned there. I do think they overlook or understate the dark side of this album though.

Saturdays = Youth is easily my favorite M83 release to date, and if it weren't for Cut Copy's In Ghost Colours, it'd probably be my favorite "shameless 80s ripoff (but in a good way)" release of 2008. I'll be honest, I haven't paid too much attention to the lyrics, but rather have focused primarily on the gorgeous sounds (esp. "Kim & Jessie" and "Graveyard Girl"), but I found your interpretations quite interesting.

I've noticed this sort of darker undercurrent to this sort of music as well, and I think that's what always draws me back, be it The Smiths, New Order, The Cure, or any of their modern followers (e.g., The Mary Onettes, My Favorite, M83, Northern Portrait). On the one hand, you have this music that is oftentimes incredibly poppy, if not downright jubilant, and yet the lyrics are full of foreboding imagery and melancholy -- even angst-ridden -- passages.

When done poorly, as can often be the case (witness a lot of so-called "emo" music), it makes for music that just can't support its own melodrama. But when it does work, I find that it adds, not only tension, but also a depth to the music that is often strongly resonant.

A perfect example of this is a song called "The Black Cassette" by the aforementioned My Favorite. It's perhaps the perfect "disaffected youth" ballad, a song about alienated teens who just sit together in their bedrooms, listening to mix tapes and frustrated in their burgeoning sexual desires. At times, it borders on navel-gazing, but ultimately, it's surprisingly tender, perfectly capturing the awkwardness and fumbling of teenage love (and lust) by recognizing and even wallowing in the melancholy of it all.