The French one-man group M83 has made a small but influential mark on the independent and electronic music scenes of the last few years. By ingeniously plagiarizing the heady, lush wall-of-sound dynamics of Loveless-era My Bloody Valentine and replacing that band’s thrumming stacks of guitar noise with its own shimmering blend of keyboards and synthesizers, M83 has achieved an ironic amount of underground success.
For M83’s new album, the side project Digital Shades Vol. 1, which is appropriately enough only available as a digital download headman Anthony Gonzalez has chosen to crib from a musical touchtone a bit closer to home, with the album neatly falling somewhere between the electronic experimentation of Brian Eno’s 1975 album Another Green World and Eno’s equally influential, 1978 installation work Ambient 1: Music For Airports. The first in a planned series of releases in between “proper” M83 albums, the ambient music of Digital Shades evokes a dreamy, contemplative landscape.
Though Gonzalez’s ambient songs are sparse and moody, content to dwell in the background of the listener’s attention, some of their titles are so on-the-nose that it almost comes across as facetious. Title track “Waves Waves Waves” begins with exactly that, a wash of synthesizers panning anticlimactically over a gentle sea spray straight out of a sound machine. A bit more intriguing is the equally spot-on “Dancing Mountains.” The crystalline, sonorous chime of a piano — greatly indebted to Another Green World‘s title track — ascends and descends as it moves through the song like a backpacker going up and down two mountainous peaks, becoming nearly inaudible before climbing back up again.
Other tracks on the album work in variations on this theme, with minimalist melodies creating a meditative, serene mood. “By The Kiss” is a gorgeous slow burn, ending in a vibrating, wailing explosion, “Coloring the Void,” one of only two tracks with lyrics, embeds its warbling, warm vocals almost imperceptibly within the mesh of sound as the song builds up, and album-closer “The Highest Journey” takes the formula to its logical conclusions, with the eight-minute song peaking in a post-rock crescendo reminiscent of Explosions in the Sky before gently falling back to earth.
A few tracks don’t heed the wisdom of these loud-soft dynamics and fall too far to either side. “Strong And Wasted” features the errant twitter of songbirds against an uncomfortable, squirming peal, like an environmentally friendly robot whirring up its circuitry. On the other hand, “Space Fertilizer” somehow lives up to both parts of its name, going nowhere with an uninspired organ effect.
The album as a whole is probably a bit too homogenous and wistful for its own good. Still, as a minimally hyped, download-only side project, Digital Shades Vol. 1 is a much better album than it has any right to be.
3 stars out of 5
