M83 at the Prince

Vulture was a little apprehensive before going to see Anthony Gonzales aka M83’s sold out performances at Prince late last week. His 6^th record, Hurry Up, We’re Dreaming was widely claimed as one of the best releases of 2011, having received a huge 9.1 on Pitchfork’s Best New Albums and it has certainly had a solid spin around our turntables. Dramatic yet dreamy guitar chords coupled with strong, harmonized vocals made this record pretty much as close to perfection as you can get. We were worried that there was no way this French artist could live up to the ridiculously high expectations we had placed on him. How very wrong we were.

The night opened with local support act Teenage Mothers and we must admit the blasé punk attitude and the accidentally-lighting-the-stage-on-fire-with-a-renegade-sparkler act is getting a little old. We hadn’t heard much about this 5-piece outfit from Western Victoria, and we can’t say we were overly impressed. They seemed to be more focused on offering the crowd nitrous oxide-filled balloons than putting together a polished act.

Their between-song antics were somewhat entertaining at times, and it was particularly amusing to see the face of the sound engineer explaining to the stage manager why the room smelled like smoke, but we can’t help but feel their live performances need to be fined tuned a bit. Their songs about rebellion, unrequited love and how to get out of parking tickets aren’t to be totally snubbed, as the melodies and subject matter were at times rather complex and dramatic, but they weren’t really for us.

After building the tension for what seemed like a lifetime, a Where the Wild Things Are-inspired creature emerged from the darkness and raised its hands to the audience before de-masking and returning as Gonzales. The recognizable chords of ‘Intro’ began, as cheesy as it sounds, a pretty incredible journey through some of the most magical music you will ever hear.

‘Wait’ gave us goose bumps that we can still feel right to our very core. The piercing, heartbreaking harmonies and soft acoustic chords were simply spectacular and dreamier than his French accent. We finally understand teenage-girl hysteria.

We finally understand teenage-girl hysteria.

The energy of everyone on stage, including the most active bassist we have ever seen, was absolutely incredible. It would be difficult to perform such music and not totally lose yourself in the moment, and their overall stage presence was second to none. Oh, did we mention that everyone plays multiple instruments? God love a band that can multitask.

However, the Prince Bandroom isn’t great for music like this and we can’t help but feel M83’s sound is far too big for such a small venue. At times, the bass completely overrode the performance, particularly during ‘Midnight City’: despite the tune in general being so powerful; there is a delicacy that you just couldn’t hear. Having said that, we completely lost our shit during the sax solo.

There is something exquisitely surreal about everything that M83 produces. This is a musician that we will go to see time and time again. He completely and utterly blew us away.

Huge thanks to Gregoire Zimmerman for taking these effing great photos of M83. See more from the show, and the rest of Gregoire’s work on his blog.

 

Tagged hurry up we're dreaming, m83, midnight city, prince, teenage mothers