America finally gets M83's first album

I'm far too young to have enjoyed shoegaze in its time. Back in the era of My Bloody Valentine's Isn't Anything and Ride's Nowhere, I was somewhere between preschool and first grade. I grew to like the style, though, and I'm always wary of new bands trying to emulate the sound -- it was a niche in music that appeared and burned out, and most attempts to recreate it end in flames and obnoxious, grating feedback.\nFrench duo M83 isn't playing shoegaze, nor are they playing electronica or whatever the new term for bleepy-bloopy knob-twiddling yawn music. They don't have a guitar-created wall of sound (opting instead for keyboards), and unlike My Bloody Valentine, you can sometimes decipher human voices singing the lyrics. Still, the comparison isn't entirely invalid: many of their songs feature grandiose, over-the-top melodies made almost inhuman by way of effects and filters, and the spirit is very much similar.\nTheir new self-titled release actually dates from 2001, when it was originally released on French label Goom Records. It was the critical and (relative) commercial success of their 2003 release Dead Cities, Red Seas and Lost Ghosts that allowed Nicholas Fromageau and Anthony Gonzalez to move to Mute records, the label on which they also released an album in 2005 entitled Before the Dawn Heals Us. Listening to this first record creates something of a roadmap to understand where their style originated and where it has been heading, and some of the tracks are unpolished or painful: "Kelly," for example, features what sounds like a vocoded-voice simultaneously gargling gasoline and yodeling. It's kind of a shame, too, because that song features some riveting guitar work layered above the horrible groans.\nThough they don't sing in a made-up elven gibberish language, M83's melodies are strikingly similar to those of Sigur Rós at times. While "I'm Getting Closer" is another of the tracks featuring warbled computer talk, its melody is not at all unlike that of the one Sigur Rós song most people have heard: "Svefn-G-Englar" (don't make me call it "the song from 'Vanilla Sky,'" please). They have the epic sweeps of organ music, but at times it strikes me as more like the soundtrack to "Castlevania."\nThere are plenty of neutral adjectives you can throw out to describe this band and sound cool: "layered," "textured," "ethereal," etc., and while they'd be entirely valid at times, so would adjectives like "meandering," "plodding" and "confused." This doesn't change the fact that M83 occupies a region in music that isn't going to broadly or instantaneously appeal to most anyone. Songs like "Night" sound at once icy and beautiful, whereas other tracks like "Facing That" sound more like they were engineered to scare mice out of your basement.\nStill, on a whole, it's a challenging and pleasing debut for a challenging and pleasing band, and more than anything else it's nice to see where the style of the entirely stunning Red Cities came from. Considering the wealth of indie acts that have put out egregious trash albums once they reached major-label status, I'm happy to watch M83 continuously improve.