M83 - 'America' (Labels UK)
3/5
By: Thomas Hannan
Ready to have your mind-state altered, your logic screwed with, your happiness in jeopardy? If the answer to all the above is go on then, purchase the record in question. Just don't come running back saying you weren't cautioned.
For this is very introspective, knowledgeable dance music, obsessed with layers, ambience and the altering of moods. Whatever your opinion of it, 'America' as an EP does have a frightening ability to bring the most ardent adversary of electronica down to its dizzying, almost bleak musical disposition. Even on repeated listens, there seems little about it that you can recall precisely (including the brief few minutes of the title-track: the most accessible thing here), other than that strange melancholy, cold feeling that hits you just the same every time you brave giving it a spin.
Not a feel-good record then, but one obsessed with feeling all the same. When machines finally reach a stage where they're capable of independent thought and the capacity to conjure up songs, the fruits of such labour could well sound like this. It's not human, and oddly this makes it all the more uneasy. The synthesised voice on 'God of Thunder', whilst so blatantly not that of an animate being, has the capacity for intrigue and wonder all the same.
The trio of tracks that open the work almost seem like short experimental ditties in comparison with the behemoth of a piece that rounds off proceedings - the truly epic seventeen minutes of 'Dead Cities, Red Seas & Lost Ghosts' which provides a wonderfully fitting opus; here the emotion, whilst still as weary as before, is allowed to breathe in some fresh air that fills the lungs to capacity. And for once, the mammoth clock-in time is entirely justified; you're led on a journey that will bear peaks and troughs of varying sensation, but never once indulges in feeling comfortable.
There's a lot to be admired in something that can be appreciated on the level that, whilst you won't feel you've been in any way improved by airing it, nor perhaps even have an urge to ever really listen to it, it can still leave you thinking that whatever's just happened in the last half-hour, it sure as hell was an experience. Be that for the better, or the unnervingly worse.
Artists in this article: M83
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