 |
Ode to be young
|
by JACK OATMON Innumerable layers of florid, nostalgic synth lines, whining guitars and fragile falsettos make Anthony Gonzales’ M83 an unmitigated guilty pleasure. His solo project’s fifth, most recent outing, Saturdays=Youth, sonically rehashes Gonzales’ salad days, considering the puppy love and formative discoveries of a Mediterranean teenager in only the most optimistic of terms. One might expect such a decidedly starry-eyed theme to tip the M83 package, already top-heavy with schmaltz, into the realm of the obnoxious. But Gonzales has an uncanny knack for making such extravagance palatable where others get mired in the syrupiness of their own self-indulgence. “It’s a tribute to my teenage years and the music and movies of the ’80s,” says Gonzales on the phone from his home in Antibes, France. “I have really good memories about it because for me being a teenager was a really cool period of my life. I feel like I discovered so many things during that period—new music, new bands and new friends. I was discovering real life. I think it’s the same kind of thing for everyone, but it was a really moving and emotional experience.” At 28, one might expect Gonzales’ emotional resonance to lay in the music of the following decade, as he would have been a teenager through the ’90s. “I was born in 1980, so I was a bit young for the music of the ’80s,” he says. “I discovered that music later as a teenager. But because I grew up in the ’80s, I’m influenced by the atmosphere of that period. The music is a big influence because my older brother used to listen to a lot of Depeche Mode and Cocteau Twins. It was in the air.” The album’s sleeve prominently features photography of awkwardly flamboyant youth of various descriptions, though Gonzales himself was more inwardly directed as a teen—not a surprising fact when paired with the meticulously controlled delicacy of his albums. “I guess I was a bit different,” he explains. “I was kind of shy, but I was playing in a rock band, so that helps connect you with people. I wasn’t too much into clothes and stuff. I just wanted to play music, so all those kids on the cover are a bit cliché, and I wasn’t quite as clichéd as they are. I wanted to have a picture of teenagers in a beautiful place, so I chose to work with that photographer [Anouck Bertin]. For the videos and the covers, the choice of artists I work with is really important to me.” Something so carefully arranged as Gonzales’ work naturally presents a challenge when translated into the live setting. He says the solution is to reinterpret the work, conserving the mood without so many layers of instrumentation. “It’s always difficult for me to reproduce live what I’ve recorded for the album. I spend so much time working on my albums so the music’s produced with a lot of tracks in it. So I chose to do a different version of the songs, otherwise it’s too complicated. Also, because this is my fifth album, so we play a lot of songs from the previous albums. So it’s an eclectic live show with a lot of different atmospheres.” WITH SCHOOL OF SEVEN BELLS AT |
