Pitchfork

Though Dead Cities, Red Seas & Lost Ghosts has its haters who demean its simplicity and melodrama-- I know a curmudgeon who considers it "Andrew Lloyd Webber's Brian Eno Superstar"-- few albums can so powerfully transform ordinary afternoon vantage points into cinematography, leaving the listener/viewer feeling, rightly, like a tool of the powerfully suggestive media that we choose to let shape our nostalgia for that gay old time when Michael Landon taught us right from wrong and mullet from man-perm.

By the way, M83 songs sometimes have vocals now, and they sound as breathy and reluctant and after-hours-in-France as you might imagine. Let's throw a reference-point party: A) This song's an outtake from a more propulsive The Soft Bulletin, only it contains an (offtime?) Interpol-esque staccato bridge. B) This song is the utopian endpoint to a teleology begun by those nineties groups such as Polara and Certain Distant Suns who struggled to be utopian endpoints to a teleology begun by My Bloody Valentine. C) This song is Ride channeling the Beach Boys, but with lyrics adapted from a junior-high horror novella: "A ghost is screaming your name/ Bleeding all around." While M83's last album may have always been a mite mournful, or ambiguously about resurrected technology or decomposing pop, the new disc threatens to contain unadulterated exuberance.