Save for a fairly half-hearted resistance to invasion, the French have had little to feel guilty about in the last fifty years. From garlic bread to Eric Cantona you can pretty much rely on their feisty, bitter magic to animate even the most insipid of dishes or laborious long-ball clashes. And their musicians are no exception, managing as they do to combine the guttural and animalistic with the bookish and the intellectual, the just plain dirty with the just plain erotic with excrutiating ease. Subtlety and finesse: those are the kinds of things we’re talking about, things ordinarily left out of our own English lexicon in favour of things like tits and arse, pie and chips and Cannon and Ball; none of which appear here thankfully. Let’s face it, the Brits can’t ‘do’ intellectual for fear of sounding like a soft bastard and asking for a punch in the face. Which ironically enough, makes us such soft fucking bastards in the first place. If the French can claim little else, they can at least claim to roll with the hardest of punches.
Riding off the back of last year’s rapturously well received, ‘Dead Cities, Red Seas & Lost Ghosts’ comes M83’s similarly sprawling cyberfest, ‘Before The Dawn Heals’. Only this time, the duo have been condensed to just Anthony Gonzalez, Nicolas Fromageau having departed on account that no one could pronounce his name nor put their finger on any discernible input beyond that of weighing his other half down.
Whilst it’s essentially more of the same, ‘Before The Dawn Heals Us’ is a more accessible affair; sleeker, more evenly weighted, more precise, more purposeful, more beautiful. Yes, we’re still dealing with the same jarring but strangely elegant cyberscapes and overwrought orchestration. Yes, we’re still exploring the gorgeous and the grotesque and film-noiring with the best of them. Only this time we’re doing it with more guitars, more theremins and more breathy vocals than you could throw a stick at. And all the better it is for it.
Like Philip. K. Dick and J.G Ballard, Gonzalez has crafted a surprisingly accessible exploration of what it is to be human; and what it is lies ostensibly in survival. And you don’t have to wait for incendiary track, ‘Car Chase Terror!’ to get a feel for it. From the gentle, plodding piano chords of ‘Safe’ and gruelling baroque excesses of ‘Can’t Stop’ it’s a record of extremities. The close, uncomfortable terror of four-minute audio-flick ‘Car Chase Terrror!’ featuring American Theatre actress, Kate Moran may labour the point home, but it’s no less deliberate a device in the tender, sparkling and lachrymose beauty of ‘Farewell/Goodbye’* and ‘I Guess I’m Floating’ – which when pitted against the clanking pandemonium of ‘Fields, Shorelines and Hunters’ and the frantic cosmic orchestra of ‘Don’t Save Us From The Flames’ defines our perilous human condition just perfectly. Sometimes it’s loud. Sometimes it’s soft. Sometimes we wake. Sometimes we sleep. Sometimes we’re negotiating our way through a sprawling electric wilderness. Sometimes we’re just watching.
Do androids dream of electric sheep? No, they dream of something far more beautiful.
*Lisa Papineau who appears on ‘Farewell/Goodbye’ also appears on ‘Surfing On A Rocket’ and ‘Biological’ on Air’s Talkie Walkie’ album..