Sounding exactly like what he says it is, Ben Khan's latest single, "Youth" represents a yelping treatise on being young, one of the best songs of 2014 thus far. The vocals rob their hush from Vernon, but the aesthetic (other than the gun sound effect, which is, of course, all MIA) is largely an M83 universe where the synthesizers head for the sky like Icarus. Despite its rich hooks, "Youth" isn't easy, a stutter-step beat that recalls something vaguely tropical without the attendant warmth. Khan finds the best of what the indie rock R&B world is capable of producing: a lean, dark, sensual world where hope lies in the fleeting glimpses of the things themselves in our peripheral vision.
Mixing buzzing synths and a top-of-the-room chorus, Glasgow band, Giant Fang construct an arena-sized generation polemic on "Golden Age". The cribbed notes from the M83 catalogue are obvious, winsome keyboards meandering through the neon backdrop of a post-John Hughes wasteland. Equally apparent is the homage to "Wake Up", a song that informed so much of what came in the decade since its release. By now we know the trick, our co-dependence mirrored in the group vocals of the hook, the meaning of our largely invisible struggles lionized in a rousing collection of "ohs". Giant Fang courts this aesthetic, singing, "We were the sons of the golden age," a place where it was hard to describe the meaning of our actions, but they sounded enormous.
Tapping the same genome that M83's "Midnight City" and the Big Pink's "Dominos" made deservedly famous, Parade of Lights, a Los Angeles band, release a stunning first single, "Just Give It Up." Made for late nights and the fuzzy neon of downtown, "Just Give It Up" smashes its way through a shout along arrangement rooted in an enormous back beat and a karate-chop vocal loop that offers an implied and metaphorical violence. There is even a hint of the Fine Young Cannibals' "She Drives Me Crazy" in the melody. It is, of course, about capitulation. On the surface, this all could be a ham-fisted allegory about sex, but grant them a bit of license and assume this surrender is lyrical, a grand giving in to the imperatives of dark bars and good looking people with downcast eyes, a dance floor burner for the zip codes of our perpetual disaffection.
To some, M83 has always had an uncanny resemblance to the John Hughes classic The Breakfast Club. This has nothing to do with the aesthetic reality that the band plays music with influences from the enormous synthesizers that so dominated mid-1980s pop music. Frontman Anthony Gonzalez possesses a knack for distilling human experience down to one frozen moment: a fist raised against a cloudy sky, a human story of difference and commonality, to say everything all at once, a frozen slice of self-actualization. Gonzalez’s gift for this type of tableau universality emerged immediately, taking the stage in full costume of the band’s creepy cover art from 2011 double LP Hurry Up, We’re Dreaming. It was doubtful this thing, somewhere between Donnie Darko and Maurice Sendak, was Gonzalez himself (he took the stage far too quickly after the bit of theater concluded) as the character, creepy and triumphant, slowly raised his arms in a crosshatch between invocation and professional wrestling introductory pageant.
The creature departed and the band took the stage as the opening notes of “Intro” leaked from the speakers. It was simple: Bring your cover art onstage in full dress, play the first song from your most recent record—form meets function. Now everybody freeze. Some in the crowd turned to their phones starting a brief but erroneous Twitter rumor that Zola Jesus, who sings on the album version of “Intro,” was in the house and singing the hook. M83, unwitting to this secondary narrative, ran through the enormous “Teen Angst” and “Graveyard Girl,” both of which possess an even more affirming quality with live drums and, at high volume, an urging to stop commenting and simply experience.
The middle of the set slowed as Gonzalez effusively thanked the audience in his French-accented impeccable English. The band played “Reunion” and “Wait,” the latter featuring an enormous duet between Gonzalez and his female keyboardist. Everything stopped for a moment. This was what the audience wanted. Next was “Midnight City,” a song with no more than four serious notes, which appeared to lift the crowd toward the top of the room, snapping digital images against the blinking stage strobes, an attempt to save this and keep it, an aperture big enough to capture the desire to feel this affirmed always.
LA's electricity and groundwater must have trace elements of neon in it. For anyone who enjoyed M83's most recent (or, hell, any) effort, Superhumanoids' "Geri" has some of the same DNA. The synths hum and the male-female vocal interplay sounds like a slow motion dribble hand-off between two sleek, languid guards. The forecast calls for something permanently dark, rife with glowing electronics and a hook sharp enough to stick in your chest.
Welcome to our annual countdown of the 50 best songs of the calendar year. Songs must be from an EP, LP or demo released during 2011, no band may appear twice. Each post title contains a lyric from one of the ten songs to follow, a hint and a hook that stuck out clearly in this group. Today, we count down 5 to 2.
Justin Vernon risked being punchline after his debut LP, For Emma Forever Ago. He gifted the listener a close-up view to a heartbreak which, in its very title, rang as chronological as it was intensely destructive. There was brutality in it to be sure, a type of riveting, car accident pathos from which the listener could neither turn from nor away. The question was not whether Vernon could rhapsodize his own pain, but could he do anything else? Bon Iver returned with a self-titled record with a markedly different directionality. "Calgary" was the first promotional release, a melting melody that showed Vernon as no less broken in 2011, though his sound had evolved in time with his lyrics. The bridge showed an assault of a different kind, all of Vernon's internal disasters, ones his listeners watched with such brutal voyeurism, turned finally democratic. We weren't watching him self-immolate anymore, we we were with him. The lyrics regarded a storm on a lake, and Vernon artfully placed us beside him, a tiny wail, "little waves our bodies break", the most evocative and fractured lyric of 2011. These inland bodies of water contained a certain mandate, he suggested, even their tiniest, lapping waves holding equally the power to break and be broken. These human dramas, small and local though they are, hold the same authority, not just to break Justin Vernon in public, but to destroy us all together. As Vernon closed, "the demons come, they can't subside", it was more than just the author who would be haunted.
It wasn't hard to feel existentially lost in 2011. It was so easy to know what something wasn't, but so much harder to know what anything was. Deconstructionism and semiotics had formally finished what sarcasm and irony had always known: No one had any idea what was good or bad anymore. Phantogram reflected on this dichotomy, finally waxing the brilliant denouement, "this is starting to fuck with my head." While, "Don't Move" never drew itself as a cultural commentary, it certainly was built to reflect this bizarre polarity with its chorus of, "All I know how to do is shake, shake/keep your body still, keep your body still." It was the dance track that told you to "stay the fuck still" (my words); it was the horn punch that dared you to move from your seat. You certainly flinched. All this came from a narrator that told you she wasn't your "your nervous feeling" or "your drinking partner" or "your paranoia" or even "your fortune teller". She wasn't anything to you, she insisted. And yet, "Don't Move" was everything in 2011. Richly contradictory, "Don't Move" told you to do one thing while making you do another. You loved it with that knowledge that this type of affection was flawed. It was organically and aesthetically delicious while acknowledging, of course you would feel that way. It was the most self-aware pop song of the year, but, then again, you knew I would say that, didn't you?
In a world of lowest common denominators where the unofficial manta can suitably be, "Always new depths", it is hard to make pop that tumbles downward but elevates all the same. Merrill Garbus and her fantastic project Tune-Yards did exactly this on "Bizness", the best song from one of the year's best releases, w h o k i l l. Easily reaking new ground, Garbus looped her stunning voice once, twice, three times and four as the backing of "Bizness". Behind break-beat drums, Garbus' signature vocal sang out like an alarm, so full of pain, so confessional ("please, at least answer me this"), so unequivocal. In places she was fragile, begging for her life and claiming victim-hood, but even these states of being soared into new echelons against a rising arrangement of horns and tumbling loops. Each movement unveiled a new layer, and each obbligato fell down the scale like it had become unhinged from the top part of the staff. "Bizness" never felt weak or wilting. Quite the contrary, Garbus closed the song's final movement screaming into her own cacophony, a brave vocal fighting against arrangement risen around her like all these terrible, beautiful crashing waves. If the parts perpetually fell around her, "Bizness" was equally, relentlessly pointed up.
2. M83 - "Midnight City"
You realized right away that it was about nothing. M83's "Midnight City" did not have a grandiose second meaning, a rich subtext, an activist stance to be uncovered. The lyrics were as muffled as they were effectively meaningless. It was pure aesthetics. The picture it painted remained rich, dark and titillating, as the very title suggested. Wailing away on a dopamine synth hook, the most singular and memorable sound of 2011, M83 etched a series of visual metaphors that took the listener on a high-speed night drive through hyper-modernity. Further even, "Midnight City" did more than seemingly emerge from some screaming neon downtown scene, it created that place. If it was about nothing, it was also from nowhere you recognized. The stylistic references of the 1980s were so solidly updated, futurized even, that strands of DNA proved labyrinthine. Picturing "Midnight City" was somehow easy, but describing it to anyone else was the rub. It was everywhere and nowhere. It sounded like a lot of things you had heard before and, again, like nothing else. And this was the success of "Midnight City", a profound dislocation in the context of the familiar. As M83 mastermind, Anthony Gonzalez rode his own hook into the late night hours, he took the listener with him, a blurry architectural tour of a place you'd never been. The lyrics and the meaning proved unimportant, the song's center successfully hollowed out to allow us inside, the purpose to be absorbed by simple osmosis, a thing you could feel coming through your skin.
People used to joke, and maybe I mean "say seriously", that M83tapped into a new Breakfast Club pathos. It was surely, "Kim And Jessie" that did it, all covered in glittering synths and a kind of crushing, downcast gaze that disenfranchised kids found uniquely appealing, while the enfranchised kids were charmed for an entirely different set of reasons. In essence, you can be Judd Nelson or Emilo Estevez, but you both can't stop looking at Ally Sheedy. Cool meet Weird, and Weird meet Cool; now try to forget who is who. This democratic appropriation of the children of the unremembered John Hughes-era was only the beginning. Latest single, "Midnight City", within four seconds one of the best songs of 2011, ports a metronomic synth yelp on the way to a shimmering tribal explosion. There is nothing in here about your lunch or your dad or detention. Forget the distant vocals, muttering truth and nonsense like, "the city is my church", and just keep your focus on the modulated sample from the opening and its screaming, beautiful, final iteration. This rings late, dangerous and certainly after curfew. Calling M83 anything close to a reference to a pop-classic about teenagers from nearly three decades ago is insulting. No high school library will be left standing in the wake of the dark neon of high noon night in the city. This weird beats that kind of cool.
