M83
Dead Cities, Red Seas & Lost Ghosts
Label:  Mute 
Date:  7/27/2004
Length:  0:00
Format:  2CD
Genre:  Rock; Alternative
  Category:  rock
    Track Listing:
      1.  
      		 Birds    
      2.  
      		 Unrecorded    
      3.  
      		 Run Into Flower    
      4.  
      		 In Church    
      5.  
      		 America    
      6.  
      		 On a White Lake, Near a Green Mountain    
      7.  
      		 Noise    
      8.  
      		 Be Wild    
      9.  
      		 Cyborg    
      10.  
      		 0078h    
      11.  
      		 Gone    
      12.  
      		 Beauties Can Die    
      13.  
      		 Tsubasa    
      14.  
      		 God Of Thunder    
      15.  
      		 In Church (Cyann & Ben Version)    
      16.  
      		 Gone (Live)    
      17.  
      		 Dead Cities, Red Seas & Lost Ghosts    
      18.  
      		 Run Into Flowers (Video)    
      19.  
      		 America (Video)    
    Additional info: | top

      Dead Cities, Red Seas & Lost Ghosts is the second album from French electronica duo M83 (Anthony Gonzalez and Nicolas Fromageau) who, thankfully, derive their name from a spiral galaxy in the constellation of Hydra and not from an interminably lackluster stretch of noxious British motorway. The name certainly nods to where their wide-eyed, spaced-out technicolor imaginations are fixed, but they also know how to sound ponderously intense--hence the cold, cello-aided sonority of "Gone," possibly the only track on the album that defies the lambent warmth of the purring analog synths and beguiling reveries that make the rest of the album as enticingly therapeutic as a thermal spa. Humane post-rock is clearly M83's strongest attribute because both "Run into Flowers" and "On a White Lake, Near a Green Mountain" are curiously pretty cameos, far removed from the automatic anemia of other workmanlike button-pushers. The high point, though, is the symphonic sweetness and motherly female choral vocals of "Beauties Can Die," which is rather like being cradled in the arms of an angel, or at the very least the arms of Sigur Ros and Lesley Garrett. If one really has to die and go to heaven, one rather hopes the journey up there will sound like this. --Kevin Maidment