The top album category of The Hype Machine’s 2011 Music Blog Zeitgeist is comprised of a mix of critically acclaimed and commercially successful albums. The selection process, briefly described on the HM website, is as follows:
“The Top 50 Albums of 2011 are sourced from 403 bloggers’ personal Top 10 lists and weighted according to their ranking.”
Some of the more notable albums included are Tune Yards’ W H O K I L L, Decemberists’ King Is Dead, Adele’s 21, Radiohead’s The King of Limbs, Shabazz Palaces’ Black Up, Jay Z & Kanye West’s Watch the Throne, Fiest’s Metals, Lady Gaga’s Born This Way, Drake’s Take Care, The Roots’ Undun, The Weeknd’s House of Balloons, and The Black Keys’ El Camino.
Higher on the list, ahead of all the albums I just mentioned, placing third in HM’s top 50 of 2011, is an album by M83 named Hurry Up, We’re Dreaming. By a wide margin, the track with the most traction on Hurry Up, We’re Dreaming is “Midnight City.”
I don’t remember my first impression of “Midnight City.” Evidently, it struck me as a song to pass over. Then mix and mash artists wore it out. When the mix and mash artists sink their talons into a song, it’s usually a sign to stay away. I stayed away and, to be honest, the parts of “Midnight City” I heard reminded me of my least favorite era of music: the early techno movement of the 1980s led by groups like Depeche Mode and Soft Cell.
When I saw that Hurry Up, We’re Dreaming had made it all the way up to the three spot, I decided to listen to the album in its entirety. I had to learn for myself why everyone was so impressed. Maybe I had blinders on. It turns out I was foolish for sleeping on M83. The album is great. I recommend it.
As for “Midnight City,” my appreciation for it has grown too. I needed to listen to it in its entirety a few times. ”Midnight City” is a song built around a powerful four note, synth-metal arrangement. At first, I didn’t find the presentation of the melody very appealing in the first-half of the song and I’m still not too crazy about it. I probably would have skipped past and never heard the second-half of the song if I had I only ever came upon “Midnight City” while listening to something like a Spotify playlist. Fortunately, my patience is much greater when I listen to full albums. When I commit to listening to an album, I prefer to hear each track from beginning to end, in sequence, uninterrupted. Had I not seen Hurry Up, We’re Dreaming on HM’s list of top 50 albums of 2011, I would have never heard the saxophone in the second-half of “Midnight City.”
A French musician named Anthony Gonzales does all the composition work for M83. He doesn’t use traditional melodic instruments very often in his music, or at least he doesn’t in Hurry Up, We’re Dreaming. Its sound is nebulous; it’s highly synthetic; it’s a lot of softly layered voices over powerful percussion. It might be a pop album if it weren’t for the series of trans-meditative tracks that interplay between the power ballads. I love how Ian Cohen of Pitchfork describes these breaks.
“While many of them stand as intriguing meditations on their own merits, they reinforce Hurry Up’s intentions to be an immersive universe– check in whenever you want, but the magic’s in the exploratory phases.”
The exploratory phase in “Midnight City” is fantastic:
A singer wails, “waiting for a car/waiting for a ride in the dark.” The melody whines. Synthetic snares and symbols thump and hiss dimly. A saxophone arrives and solos aimlessly — an unexpected but distinctive sound that leads the moment it becomes audible.
I consider the song’s ending necessary in order to fully appreciate its beginning. I like to think the melody was designed for the background — a background in which an instrument like the saxophone can float to the front. The scene is a city at the midnight hour. Neon signs, skyline, flashing movement — all are part of the lyrical imagery. Sonically, I chose to allow the melody to represent the city; it’s slightly irritating, maybe a little uncomfortable, and probably a little too strong, especially initially. The beauty can be found by surveying the entire package, specifically how the song builds then slips to the background so as to allow something distinct to emerge in the forefront. The saxophone and its timing doesn’t just fit within the constructs of the song — it’s perfect for the song.
It took me a while to recognize this. A three-minute prelude to a single minute of what, judged independently, is probably an unremarkable couple of bars of saxophone. But together, layered, it works almost effortlessly. The song is nearly finished by the time the missing part is added and suddenly it all snaps into place.
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How long before the Sabres find a saxophone?