1) Birds; 2) Unrecorded; 3) Run into Flowers; 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
Cold and harsh winter landscapes set to crescendos of discordant guitars and swirling synths. Both an evolution and a sidestep in the wider picture, but also the most atmospheric work from an act famed for it.
Key tracks: "Unrecorded", "On a White Lake, Near a Green Mountain", "0078h"
The cover for Dead Cities, Red Seas & Lost Ghosts is probably meant to come across serene - a group of children spending time together doing nothing at all like small town kids do, and probably making snow angels on that field. But there's something unsettling about it to me, though. It's weird to say this from an image but it looks almost too quiet, like everything has paused to an unnatural still around the frame of the picture and you have this disquieting feeling that there's something creeping in the background, right out of sight and there's something stranger about those kids who've fallen on the ground. And the music associated with that cover probably has a lot to do with that
Dead Cities etc is musically anything but serene - it's loud, sometimes close to even harshly so. It's primarily because of the guitars and how they are wielded throughout the twelve songs. M83's debut was an atmospheric electronic album with an edge, but for the second album the still-duo have started utilising guitars as a core element of their sound, but abstaining from treating them as a melodic instrument. Dead Cities is full of jagged, distorted guitar walls, mixed high above the other elements: fuzzy synthesizers which sound like they're defying their date of obsoletion, loud crashing drums, almost-industrial sound effects - all sounds that have a similar hard hit. It's similar to how guitars are used in shoegaze, which Dead Cities takes some influence from, but in this case the effect is as if the guitarist had hit the wrong pedal and gone for sharp distortion over echoing reverb. If you can call guitars stabbing, it's the perfect way to describe them here. Just their tone enough is to make the album sound slightly ominous: there's something in them that twitches the reflex to run and never look back no matter what you hear right behind you.
Besides shoegaze, post-rock tends to get thrown around a lot as a descriptor for Dead Cities and though it's not a perfect comparison, they both share the same emphasis on dynamics. Most of the songs here are centered around vivid shifts in scope and size in the sound: from how "Unrecorded" melts away its loud alternative rock guitars for its synth-filled second half, the looming organ of "Church" flicking into the high-speed chaos in "America", the constantly growing "On a White Lake, Near a Green Mountain" that sticks to its basic loop but keeps building it louder and more crushingly towering. Vocals aren't really a thing yet for M83 and they barely feature here apart from a few brief and usually wordless appearances and some sample work, and so many of these strictly instrumental works have a cinematic quality to how they build themselves, with a vivid scene set to each song that you can comfortably envision with your imagination, simply on the evocative strength of the music. A cheekier way to describe it would be that it's the crescendos of post-rock with all the minutes of predecessing noodling chopped out; though together these 12 songs do form a greater whole even if it rarely segues from one song to another.
Even though it's only the second M83 album, in retrospect it's already a peculiar detour in the otherwise fairly linear evolution of M83 and it does tie itself together to the main timeline by its emphasis on big, epic moments that M83 are so fond of, but there's little of the euphoria or exhuberance that they normally bring to the table. Only "0078h" sounds genuinely upbeat, with its sampled and cut vocals bouncing around brightly across the atypically positive backdrop: it's a genuinely welcome breather after the dramatic multi-song mountain before it that it gleefully rides down from. Dead Cities isn't a dark record but it's a cold one - something out of a dark winter night, where it's forebodingly quiet and pervasively cold in a way that gets to your bones. The sharp sounds flare up a constant sense of unease, and the contrast between the violent metal cutter guitars and the deeply immersive analog synth sounds is wonderful, and my favourite songs here are the ones where M83 really emphasise that juxtaposition: "Unrecorded" was the first M83 song I heard and it was absolutely arresting from the very first moment, and the switch from its intense first half to the contemplative, stargazing second part never sounds any less inspired, while "On a White Lake, Near a Green Mountain" is an exercise in pinpointing a particularly striking mood and then digging deeper and deeper into it with each loop of swirling synthesizers and textural guitar chords. And while it is a slightly different take on the usual M83 traits, there's still overlap: "Run into Flowers" is a look forwards towards Before the Dawn Heals Us, "Gone" gives the great final scene crescendos they're famous for and "Beauties Can Die" is the traditional gentle near-ambient closer, and this time it's also the one song on the record where all discordant elements are gone and what's left are simply the twinkling melodies gently falling from the sky like a peaceful if wistful snowfall.
Dead Cities, Red Seas & Lost Ghosts is a great record. It's arguably the most atmospheric M83 have ever been - including the albums that directly leaned towards ambient or movie scores - and if the mood they've picked is the unnerving first 40 minutes of a thriller film right before things begin to escalate, then so be it and they've pulled it off excellently. Throughout it's a captivating, entrancing record, and it really highlights just how great Gonzalez and (on this record) Nicolas Fromageau are at creating stories out of just music because it's those visual images, a lot of which are hard to jot down in writing without coming across a little too self-indulgent, that come to my mind first and foremost when I think of the record. It's a strange, barren record that's continents away from the verdant summers of their biggest albums and while I prefer some of those overall, there's a kind of wizardry here they've not touched since. There's a world within these songs that I'm cautious to explore, but which I'm absolutely compelled to.
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