M83’s Saturdays=youth – My Long-Awaited Genre-Buster

M83 is a French shoegaze band with 5 currently available albums. I’ve listened to a bunch of their songs, but mostly the albums ‘Dead Cities, Red Seas, and Lost Ghosts’ and ‘Saturdays=youth’. While I love ‘Dead cities…’, which is one of the band’s pure shoegaze albums, their latest release, Saturdays=youth, has become one of my favorite albums for it’s interesting genre-bending.

Now, I had never listened to any shoegaze before M83, so I didn’t really know what to expect, but Saturdays=youth is only as much a shoegaze album as it is an 80s-era synth-pop album. Needless to say, this is quite an odd genre combination, but it works exceedingly well and creates a niche that I’ve ling searched for.

Firstly, I want to talk about post-rock. I’ve been listening to post-rock for a few years now, but I still feel like I’m trying to get into it. I love the emotion that comes from post-rock, but I don’t like how most post-rock songs have to switch between extreme minimalism and bombastic beauty. It creates too much of a conflict of interest with whatever I’m in the mood for. This is why I found Mogwai interesting, since they have a more consistent pace throughout an individual song, but the trouble with them is that the songs on one album sound so different from each-other that the conflict just gets worse.

Saturdays=youth is exactly what I’ve always wanted out of post-rock. It’s got all the walls of noise, twinkling guitars, emotional riffs, and other good stuff that comes with post-rock. However, the sound is consistent through any given song, And while the album’s songs all have different tempos and emotion, they all have the same sort of energy that makes them flow into each-other.

Secondly, I’d like to bring us to 80s synth-pop. I’ve got far less experience with this, but it is another genre with elements that I love, but have always wanted it to sound a certain way. Most of the 80s songs I’ve heard were turn-offs but would often have exactly one element I really loved, or there would be individual songs I enjoyed by artists I otherwise didn’t care for (like Metro or Never Gunna Give You Up). I’ve kind of always wanted a modern take on the genre that didn’t stick too hard to conventions.

Saturdays=youth takes all the elements I love from post-rock and 80s synth pop and merges them together in aa way that flat-out works. The album is a lot of fun and forces me into repeated listens. I kind of wish it weren’t the only album of it’s kind, but that also makes the songs that much more special. For me, the album is irreplaceable.

All that said, my favorite tracks are probably Kim & Jessie, Graveyard Girl, Coleurs, We Own the Sky, and Dark Moves of Love. The whole album is great, though. I even find myself occasionally sitting through the 10 minutes of one note that is Midnight Souls Still Remain.