MUSIC

Trinity Centre, Bristol (Tue 17 Jan)

Tonight, any attempt to identify a song by its intro quickly regresses into a game of cheapest reductive jab. “Poor man’s Gang Gang Dance!” “Instrumental Vampire Weekend!” “You know when you put your Tears for Fears records on at the wrong speed...?” To recreate this game at home: play the album through your phone (for the full experience: put your heating on full blast; hastily flick the light on and off).

Sever their high fidelity and M83 fizzle out in a constant fit of pulpy synth arpeggios that swell often in volume but seldom in feeling. It’s a curse of their perfectionism, having an album – a back catalogue – relying so heavily on texture, that shoegaze-influenced dance music (or vice versa) can quickly turn into an 80s high school prom slow dance with the hyperactive kid working the volume knob.

There’s a memorable moment amongst the refuse but it’s a disappointingly predictable one, in the form of the inevitable soundtrack to all future Olympics finishing line montages, ‘Midnight City’. It’s the creaky, high-pitched, distorted vocal hook – catchy and aching in the perfect ratio to induce joyous spells of vertigo – that lifts the song to the level of seriously indisputable highlight: a signifier of a show hardly worth remembering. (Leah Pritchard)

Copyright Leah Pritchard 2012