Most Helpful Customer Reviews
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5 of 9 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Beauty in Decay, 9 Feb 2005
When I saw the impending release date of this album, I knew I had to have it after having enjoyed 'Dead Cities,... etc' so thoroughly. I was hoping for more of the same sweeping, simple dance and electro-rock cross-overs that it had on it, for example the flawless 'America.'Upon placing this into my CD player, I have to admit, I was a little shocked. The album starts with 'Moonchild,' a simple distorted piano and vocal sample track that was ever-so different to the sounds of the first. When this was followed up by the single 'Don't Save Us From the Flames,' I felt my fears were almost confirmed. It's fundamentally a pop song albeit one of the most original pop songs I've ever heard as it mixes the creativity and originality that seems common to all good french artists with the freshness of electro-rock. But I persevered and I'm glad I did. Any of the tracks on their own may have left me dubious but as a whole this album is almost an electro-opera, ranging from the Kevin Shields style 'I guess I'm floating,' to the fantastic 'Car Chase Terror' which never fails to make all my hair stand on end. This album shares that quality that made their second album so note-worthy. With this release, M83 show us that it is possible to combine frenetic energy with scouring emotion in the same track without ever needing to compromise their own intrinsic style. I can already say that this is going to be up there in my top five albums of 2005. Don't leave it out of your music collection.
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8 of 22 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
Dissapointing, 8 Feb 2005
By A Customer
M83's 'Before the Dawn Heals Us' is an absurdly OTT space opera, pushing both the kitsch and the sonic noisescapes to 11. Now shorn of one member, M83 is now only Anthony Gonzalez, with lyrics apparently written by his brother as a soundtrack to an unmade film (yawn). Whereas the awesome 'Dead Cities...' let the music do most of the talking, arguably with at least one massive crescendo too many, 'Before the Dawn Heals Us' is marred by the same 'Franglais' prog pretensions as the last two Air Records. Where it succeeds over those albums however, is through the disarming overdrives of retro synth and melody that captured our attention on 'Dead Cities' and a few moments of pop perfection. It starts with the cringe-making 'Moonchild', which comes on like a Lemon-Jelly-esque spoken-word sample (but evidently written and performed especially) of some Sci-Fi nonsense about a little boy who created the moon. Moving swiftly on, 'Don't Save Us From The Flames' is a gorgeous slice of futurist pop that kicks anything on 'Talkie Walkie' well into touch. 'In the Cold I'm Standing' is moody ambient, while 'Farewell / Goodbye' is more ponderous prog on the wrong side of cheesy. Then there is a sagging mid-section trio of 2 minute doodles that sound like incidental music for (yawn again) a science fiction film. 'Teen Angst' kicks in with much more purpose, another MBV/Slowdive psychedelic pop anthem, followed by 'Safe', which sounds like the Hamlet cigar advert piano refrain remixed by Vangelis (in a good way). 'Car Chase Terror' is fitted with pseudo B-Movie dialogue of a frightened woman being 'chased' but is not scary at all and really quite silly. The amusingly titled 'A Guitar and a Heart' is a kind of cross-breed Hawkwind / Osric Tentacles cock-rocking finale that is as enjoyable as it is dumb. M83 were never one for subtleties, and although there is much to enjoy here, there is also much that is embarrassingly bad.
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2 of 7 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Music fully understands emotion, 9 Jun 2005
France has certainly awarded us with some of the most talented musicians in the last few decades. Like Jean-Michel Jarre and Air, M83 bring to the broad-minded audience that we most probably are, another enchantingly and often mystifying masterpiece. This album could quite easily be a Continuation from the previous album, as if Anthony and Nicolas (the two founding members) decided they had used every last ounce of their emotions up and rested until two years later to see if it has been restored. But Nicolas doesnt really want to go through it all again, so Anthony Gonzalez is quite happy to take the lead on his own. And this is what the album seems to say - that Anthony appears to like this emotional rollercoaster and finds it so captivating that he is prepared to share it with us. I suppose the question is, are you ready to delve into the small, enticing jar, that just so happens to be labelled 'M83', and discover that it isn't such a small jar after all, but another world that lays way beyond the stars of emotion and the planets of anger, sadness and sorrow.
However, the album only received four stars from me because of the broken and interrupted bursts of powerful anger that Anthony can also embody as well as his love and compassion, and this anger comes in the form of songs such as "Fields, Shorelines and Hunters" & "*". But the album is in no way let down by these songs and by the time "Lower Your Eyelids To Die With The Sun" is brining the long journey to an inspirational and incredibly uplifting finale, you can only think that the epic voyage has been well worth it.
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