It may be 2016, but listening to “Junk,” the new album released by M83 on Friday, feels like a throwback to prom after-parties circa 1983, complete with torn taffeta and neon eyeliner. Laser guns, reverberating echoes and epic dance-hall instrumentals are just some of the album’s otherworldly features.
With a pleasant mix of slow down-beats, distorted vocals and peppy, hair-tossable keyboard riffs, M83 cashes in all of your favorite ‘80s music clichés.
Unfortunately, M83 gets caught under the weight of the clichés by trying too hard to imitate. A lot of the album’s potential was lost.
“Junk” definitely isn’t a “junk” album, given its high-quality production and pretty, crystal-clear melodies. Nevertheless, it remains an appropriate title, considering it sounds a bit like flipping through old photo albums in your grandmother’s attic.
In terms of the music’s ability to paint a picture in listeners’ heads, “Junk” does a fantastic job. It feels more like watching a movie than it does listening to your average album, and is full of catchy hooks and mutating features that capture the listener’s attention and hold it throughout all 15 tracks.
Despite the colorful imagery, though, “Junk” as a whole doesn’t leave behind a taste of anything particularly memorable.
The first two songs of the album serve as an overture to the rest. They seem to establish the general picture of what’s going on. Using this tactic, it’s clear by the end of “Go!,” the album’s second track, that M83 is trying to send the message: If you thought we were kidding about the ‘80s stuff, joke’s on you!
Each track that follows seems to describe some different sort of an almost-forgotten teenage love story. It feels like that dream you had last weekend that sits on the edge of your memory and isn’t tangibly real.
They seem to progressively bring us further and further into that dream — with the last three soft songs reluctantly waking the listener up. There’s a note of nostalgia, but despite its “mainstream-yet-out-of-place” qualities and general dreamlike strangeness, the album fails to generate a resonant image for itself.
With that in mind, notes from some of the album’s shining moments do remain on the tip of the listener’s tongue. The songs “Go!,” “Solitude” and “Atlantique Sud” are some of the highlights of “Junk.”
With the level of dreaminess found in “Junk,” an artist walks a fine line between sounding like some sort of elucidating, drug-induced vision and sounding like a confused mess. Anthony Gonzalez, the leader of M83, manages to balance this quite nicely, resulting in an album that teeters toward the edge of a breakthrough but just barely misses it.
The emotional ballads of the album manage to bring it toward another fine line — the balance between sounding like a lullaby and like something played from a boom box at a cheap Chinese food restaurant. Too many of the songs come dangerously close to the latter.
Given the exaggeration of the varied elements on “Junk,” at moments it can almost sound like a parody. In fact, the term ‘kitsch’ comes to mind during the blast off-style countdown in the track “Go!” It’s almost enough to bring a wincing smile to the face of anyone who’s ever listened to Men Without Hat’s “The Safety Dance.”
Keeping this in mind, one wonders if Gonzalez is trying to make an artistic statement about his own obsession with ‘80s music, or if “Junk” is simply an expression of something he’s been longing to do his entire career.
Gonzalez certainly wins points for the variety of sounds explored, the album’s degree of novelty and his courage as an artist to do whatever he wants with his music without regard for current trends.
Overall, “Junk” is an extraordinarily pleasant album, but it still cannot compare to M83’s 2011 hit “Midnight City,” with its epic description of “waiting in a car.”
It may not be something for every day, but whenever someone throws an ‘80s themed roller-rink party, hats will most assuredly go off to Anthony Gonzalez.
