Venue: Tvornica Kulture, Zagreb
Concert date: June 5, 2012
Attendance: 1,500
Ticket price: €17.30 / €19.50
M83 is a music project, or band, whose head and heart is Anthony Gonzalez, a Frenchman of Spanish descent. They’re named after the spiral galaxy Messier 83. In the beginning Nicolas Fromageau helped shape the band too, but he left after the first successes in 2003. Since then Gonzalez has surrounded himself with all sorts of musicians, with only his brother Yann Gonzalez and multi-instrumentalist Morgan Kibby as closer partners. They’ve been on the scene for a little over ten years; the debut ”M83” came out back in 2001. They embody a kind of triangle between shoegaze psychedelia, new wave and ambient music, all wrapped up in a distinctive space-pop equation. The eighties influences are obvious, but you can’t mention this band without also noting the influence of ambient and electronic musicians like Brian Eno, Terry Riley, Klaus Schulze and Jean-Michel Jarre, and of bands like My Bloody Valentine, Pink Floyd, Kraftwerk, Talk Talk, Simple Minds and Cocteau Twins. Their rise within the music community began around 2005, soon after the release of their third album ”Before the Dawn Heals Us”. That’s when the West also discovered the first two records, which various media quickly put on an urban pedestal and declared paradigmatic examples of quality 21st-century music. With his fifth record ”Saturdays = Youth”, Gonzalez only confirmed his genius. Besides excellent critical reception, the album was also hugely well received by listeners. The steep climb upward had begun. With this album M83 reached the wider mainstream media for the first time and played as a support act for The Killers, Depeche Mode and Kings of Leon. But the real breakthrough for Gonzalez was the latest album, ”Hurry Up, We’re Dreaming”. ”The indie bible”, the American online music outlet Pitchfork, named it the third-best album of 2011 and put its single Midnight City at number one among tracks. Praise poured in from elsewhere too, and listeners (we included) took it as their own.
As soon as the tour was announced and Zagreb was confirmed as one of the stops, a real mini-euphoria broke out in ”indie” circles. Having seen the show, we can say it was justified. But slow down, let’s start from the beginning. Already on arrival in Zagreb, right in front of the scene of the ”crime”, Tvornica Kulture, the mood was pleasant and positive. Credit is due to the organizers, who kept their cool despite a nearly sold-out hall and a huge crowd, and didn’t hassle and traumatize people with rules and regulations. The audience was cultured, so that would have been a big mistake for the overall atmosphere. Before M83 themselves, the crowd was thoroughly warmed up by Zagreb electro-pop act How Convinient, who didn’t play a live set this time. Their music is easiest to describe as a psychedelic, galactic electro experience where the analog and the digital are in constant conflict. They combine all sorts of electro genres, from disco and house to deep techno and so on. A perfect preparation for the first name of the night.
M83 started the show with the usual fifteen-minute delay. And the start was a real little shock. To the accompaniment of hymn-like, atmospherically rich music, a girl marched onto the stage wearing a strange mask on her head, the one that graces the cover of ”Hurry Up, We’re Dreaming”. It all looked like the ritual opening of some mystical experience we were about to witness. After this unusual, ethereal intro, the first sounds of the opening track ”Intro” rang out. The members of M83, with Gonzalez at the helm, walked onto the stage at a slow, calm, not at all sensational pace. On ”Intro”, American musician Zola Jesus helped shape the vocals in the studio, and here she was worthily replaced by multi-instrumentalist Morgan Kibby. I’d also like to point out how fascinating it was to watch all the instrument swapping throughout the entire set. That way the band members weren’t just maintaining some kind of art-for-art’s-sake diversity; this constant swapping of ”roles” produced an extremely interesting team energy that kept fertilizing the band and holding them at a high level throughout the set. Over time Gonzalez too, who is clearly shy by nature (he keeps saying so himself in interviews, and his body language says the same), arrived at a place that allowed him a ”frontman” posture. ”Intro” is built on playing with tension from the ground up. The moment Gonzalez first touched the microphone and whispered the words ”We didn’t need a story, we didn’t need a real world / We just had to keep walking / And we became the stories, we became the places /We were the lights, the deserts, the faraway worlds / We were you before you even existed” the crowd began to become one with the musicians on stage, and with Gonzalez and Kibby’s shouts of ”We carry on, carry on / Follow us, we are one…” real ecstatic rapture took over. Dreams ruled Tvornica. ”Intro” was followed by the hypnotic ”Teen Angst”, accompanied by these four enigmatic lines: ”The more we learn / The more we cry / How fast we burn / How fast we die” and, at the close, ”I hear the planet crying now…”. The next song, ”Reunion”, can already be called the first peak of the night. The signature musical elements of the dancey eighties and the piercing, direct lyrics (You came out of nowhere / Stealing my heart and brain / Flaming my every cell / You make me feel myself… You make me feel my soul / There’s no more loneliness / Only sparkles and sweat / There’s no more single fate / You make me feel myself) and the stadium-style singing (Oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, ohohoh…/ Will you stand in this land forever?) pushed the boiling point in the hall to the max. Because of the heat, dousing yourself with water was mandatory. But it felt like paradise. Wherever you looked, you saw smiling, delighted faces. Serotonin flowed in streams. ”Reunion” poured into the instrumental ”Sitting”, the only track from the debut ”M83” at the show. The dance rhythms kept going, and the whole thing turned into an early-eighties disco party. Next came another instrumental, ”Year One, One UFO”, a dance bomb ”stuffed” with a country touch. The dreamy ode ”We Own The Sky” calmed the dance floor down a little, made the mood more intimate and got us ready for the central peak of the show, the trio ”Steve McQueen-Wait-Fall”.
The infectious ”Steve McQueen” is a tribute to the famous American actor Steve McQueen, who, after doctors officially could no longer help with his cancer treatment, headed to Mexico for unconventional therapy. McQueen serves as a paraphrase for renewal of the spirit, for fighting, for reassessing values: ” There’s a magic inside. / Just waiting to burst out. / The world is a goldmine. / That will melt tomorrow”. After another inspiring and playful song came the cathartic part of the show. ”Wait”, with its minimalist, quiet and calm design, delivered exactly what ”Steve McQueen” was talking about. We drifted off into an unknown sphere, a path to x…” Send your dreams / Where nobody hides / Give your tears / To the tide / No Time / No Time / There’s no end / There is no goodbye / Disappear / With the night / No Time / No Time”. Who could have expected anything more after that? Who could have expected a cover of electronic heroes Daft Punk? What followed was an explosive, dark and dynamic cover of ”Fall”. It hits. Hard. Even now, when I think about it. I see it, feel it, smell it, touch it, taste it.
The tenth song, ”This Night Flash”, served as the lead-in to the most anticipated moment of the night, the urban anthem ”Midnight City”. Unfortunately, technical problems hit right during this song (on the drums), but the ”epic sax guy” saved it anyway, playing a brilliant, illuminating saxophone solo. The line ” The city is my church” only shone in all its essence with that jazzy touch. A brilliant song, a perfect pop hit that will be with us for a long time. The opening riff is out of this world. Pitchfork didn’t declare it song of 2011 for nothing. M83 closed the official part of the set with the sweet ”A Guitar and a Heart”. The song took the crowd to the peak and left them there, euphoric and craving another fix. The addictive, bombastic electro rhythms sent all our blood pressure up to 200 and beyond. After loud cheering they came back quickly and played two more songs in the encore. On ”Skin of the Night” the erotic voice of Morgan Kibby stepped to the front, seemingly made for these lines: ”Oh Queen of the Night / Well she is deep inside / She is haunting me /(All of her soft parts call to me / She could be mine)”. And just when we all thought it was over, the final peak arrived, ”Couleurs” from the second-to-last record, Saturdays = Youth . An experimental, otherworldly experience. The moment when the whole show turned into ten minutes of going ”upside down” crazy. Rave party! We were more in the air than on the ground, on clouds and unknown paths. And then it was over. It came kind of fast. It felt like twenty minutes of heaven, but in reality it lasted about an hour longer. Still too little. If I had to point to a weak spot, it would definitely be the shortness of the show.
All in all, M83 deserve a high grade. You can see they’re at the peak of their creative power right now. The band is in exceptional live form. They kept the show running at high revs the whole way, so there were no needless energy dips. They created their own world, bewitched and enchanted the crowd, caught the vibe and breathed as one with the audience. That’s also why none of the performers had any trouble with arrogance or needless posing; everything came across as very modest, yet still very present. The setlist was superbly structured, in the right balance, with the right dose of hits and lesser-known songs. When a band sounds better live than on studio recordings, you know they’re on the right track. They work on stages of every size. When I watched their Coachella set live on YouTube two months ago, I came away thinking they were made for open spaces, for festival crowds, but with the Tvornica show they confirmed that smaller, more intimate spaces suit them too.
Besides Gonzalez, who turns into more of a real frontman from show to show, the other band members deserve praise too, though Gonzalez surprisingly didn’t introduce them (it’s also worth mentioning Gonzalez thanking the Zagreb crowd several times, who really earned it with their response). Multi-instrumentalist Morgan Kibby added a much-needed feminine sentiment to the show, thrilling with an outstanding voice and filling out the background of Gonzalez’s vocal landscape. Drummer Loïc Maurin wonderfully controlled the volume and made sure the performance was rhythmically perfect. Saxophonist Ian Young, a respected musician on the New York jazz scene and known for numerous gigs in more pop waters too, played on only two songs, ”Midnight City” and the last one, ”Couleurs”, but with passionate, virtuosic playing he was a huge added value to the whole performance. You could split the whole show into the moment before and after his appearance on ”Midnight City”. ”Masterpiece”. But the one who stood out most for activity on stage was the young guy picked at an audition, Jordan Lawlor. An incredibly charismatic multi-instrumentalist who wasn’t still for a single second. He danced constantly, swapped instruments like it was a joke, flirted with the audience and kept raising the already high energy in the band.
The sound in the hall was excellent; no dropouts, no noise, no needless tonal wobbles. The crowd was mixed in age and nationality. There were plenty of locals, of course, then an unbelievably large number of Slovenes, and we even spotted Italians, Portuguese and Spaniards (Erasmus exchanges do their thing).
The show can be called a concert of superlatives. And once again it turned out how much sharper Croatia is than Slovenia at landing young names that actually mean something right now. M83 seems like an act made to order for Križanke or at least for Kino Šiška; the show would sell out and be delivered at the highest possible level. Sadly, we’ve missed the boat again by a year, two or more. Let’s just hope M83 keep growing year after year and that one day they stop in Slovenia too. Finally, I’d also like to thank the Ride With Me crew, who organized transport from Slovenia to Zagreb and gave many Slovenes a cheaper and more comfortable ride to and from the show.
Setlist
Intro
1. Teen Angst
2. Reunion
3. Sitting
4. Year One, One UFO
5. We Own The Sky
6. Steve McQueen
7. Wait
8. Fall (Daft Punk cover)
9. This Bright Flash
10. Midnight City
11. A Guitar and Heart
–encore–
12. Skin of the Night
13. Couleurs
Photo gallery
