CD Reviews

M83: Saturdays = Youth

Mute

By SHARON STEEL | April 15, 2008

3.0 Stars

Saturdays = Youth is M83’s version of a high-school yearbook — aural snapshots documenting gilded angsty awkwardness in all its glory. The liner notes feature a sun-saturated photo shoot of a gang of sharp-dressed teens that could have been torn from a 1985 issue of Sassy. It’s hard to tell whether they’re the cool kids or the outcasts — but really, it doesn’t matter: romanticized confusion is the heart of Saturdays’ æsthetic. Because he grew up obsessing over John Hughes films and new-wave bands, M83 mastermind Anthony Gonzalez’s fourth full-length serves as both a tribute to and a reinterpretation of ’80s culture. Co-producers Ken Thomas (Sugarcubes, Cocteau Twins, Suede) and Ewan Pearson (the Rapture, Ladytron) assist in re-creating a series of ambient memories that are universally specific. You can marvel at the ringer for Molly Ringwald on the cover while listening to the shoegazy “Graveyard Girl” (an homage to Pretty in Pink); you can take a lonely suburban summer drive to the electro anthem “We Own the Sky”; and “Kim & Jessie” is equally suited to moping or making out in your parents’ basement. This is an album steeped in a generation’s worth of nostalgia, but unlike most rehashed coming-of-age exercises, Saturdays = Youth manages, in its own small way, to offer something entirely new.

M83 | Middle East downstairs, 480 Mass Ave, Cambridge | June 2 | 617.864.EAST

Topics: CD Reviews , Anthony Gonzalez, Ewan Pearson, John Hughes, More

| More

ARTICLES BY SHARON STEEL

LENA DUNHAM AND HBO GET IT RIGHT | April 13, 2012
When a new television show chronicling the lives of young women arrives, it tends to come packaged with the promise that it will expertly define them, both as a generation and a gender.

EUGENIDES'S UPDATED AUSTEN | October 12, 2011
For his long-awaited third novel, Jeffrey Eugenides goes back to look at love in the '80s — and apparently decides that it's a lot like love in the early 19th century.

REVIEW: RINGER | September 08, 2011
Sixty seconds into the CW's new psychological thriller Ringer, star Sarah Michelle Gellar is seen running from a masked attacker in the darkness.

LOVE'S LEXICOGRAPHER | February 10, 2011
As the editorial director at Scholastic, David Levithan is surrounded by emotional stories about adolescents. Being overexposed to such hyperbolic feelings about feelings could easily turn a writer off pursuing such ventures himself — despite the secrets he may have picked up along the way.

REVIEW: MTV'S ''SKINS'' | January 26, 2011
MTV has rated its new Skins TV-MA LDS - which in plain English means teenagers smoking weed, popping pills, fucking each other, and having emotional breakdowns in a scripted show that MTV would like us to think is designed to be viewed by adults.