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| Pitchfork |
 Late last year, Anthony Gonzalez announced his next album was almost complete and would be "very, very, very epic." With all due respect, consider the redundancy of that statement: Since 2003 breakthrough Dead Cities, Red Seas & Lost Ghosts, every new and increasingly colossal M83 studio record has led to widespread crowdsourcing of synonyms for "epic." What exactly was he promising other than simply another album?Well, throughout the past decade, the 30-year old Gonzalez has honored the tremendous impact of growing up during the golden age of CD buying by implicitly serving as a patron saint for those who treat the weekly trip to the record store as a pilgrimage and still covet the album as a physical proposition: His output always comes stylishly packaged, with cover art worth obsessing over and credits that need to be scoured in order to spot the guest appearances. Unsurprisingly, he ups the ante here by aspiring to what is still the paradigm of artistic permanence, both in terms of legacy and tactility: the double album, that occasionally ambitious, usually decadent, and almost always fascinatingly flawed endeavor of musicians convinced (rightfully or otherwise) that they're at the peak of their own powers. Hurry Up, We're Dreaming might be all of those things, but above all else, it's the best M83 record yet. But let's talk about restraint for a moment: While each side of Hurry Up would be oddly slight for an M83 album, the demands of its 74-minute runtime are hardly daunting. It's actually the easiest M83 album to consume in one sitting, a reverse accumulation of past strengths that makes for Gonzalez's most compact and combustive music yet. He continues the path set by Saturdays=Youth by easing out of the mini-movie business in exchange for pop songcraft, while trading that LP's pretty-in-pink pastels for the urban neons and fluorescents of Before the Dawn Heals Us and embodying Dead Cities' mile-wide expansiveness...full text |
| Guardian |
| Never shy of delivering an electro cri de coeur where a simple chord progression will do, Anthony "M83" Gonzalez fully indulges his fondness for the grand gesture on his sixth record. Tsunami-like washes of retro synths, saxophone solos and melancholic vocals clamour for attention during this double concept album, which blends familiar M83 influences (shoegaze, goth pop) and stretches them to the size of the Californian desert where it was recorded. Gonzalez's commitment to excess can get a little wearying – even the meditative "Splendor" enlists a choir to ramp up the emotion – but the road-movie rush of highlights of "Midnight City" is hard to beat....full text |
| Stereogum |
| Anthony Gonzalez has spent the better part of three years working on the grand, expansive double LP Hurry Up, We’re Dreaming, and it shows. The new M83 album sounds incredible, and it sounds incredible in the sort of way that lets you know real work went into every single synth-plink in the album’s 1.2 hours. Even in the odd moments when songs dissolve into fuzz as they end, that fuzz feels meticulously constructed; every sputter is in its right place. In interviews, Gonzalez has been saying that the album is basically every M83 album put together. And it’s true; you can hear bits of the digital shoegaze gleam of Dead Cities, Red Seas & Lost Ghosts, the amber-tinted nostalgic hum of Saturdays=Youth, and, more than anything, the overblown synth-rock grandeur of Before The Dawn Heals Us. It’s a lot to take in. Hurry Up, We’re Dreaming is one of those double albums that would fit onto a single CD, like Prince’s Sign ‘O’ The Times. And like Sign ‘O’ The Times, it feels huge enough that it deserves the double-album designation anyway; every early listen has revealed a few new tricks that I hadn’t noticed on previous spins. But this is where I stop comparing it to Sign ‘O’ The Times, since Hurry Up, We’re Dreaming isn’t constructed as some grand generation-defining arc; one track doesn’t have a whole lot to do with the next. There’s a lot of variation here, from the psych-folk rush of “Year One, One UFO” to the crashing orchestral flourishes of “My Tears Are Becoming A Sea,” but these different moods and ideas don’t really build on one another. Instead, they serve as a series of pocket epics. I listened to the album on shuffle once by mistake, and I didn’t even notice until about halfway through. It made no impact whatsoever on my enjoyment of the thing. Heard as a serious of isolated tracks, Hurry Up, We’re Dreaming can be just amazing; certain moments absolutely sparkle. Zola Jesus wails through her part on “Intro,” and I wish she would’ve sung on the entire album. “Splendor,” all hushed harmonies and spare piano tones, works as a long, contented exhalation. “Raconte-Moi Une Histoire,” with its sampled little-kid nonsense and its happy synth-ripples, is just charming in the most twee way possible. Virtually every track on the album seems custom-built to make everything around you look way more spectacular while you’re listening to it on headphones. If you’re the type of person who goes jogging alongside canals at sunset, this album should make your life immeasurably better....full text |
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