Hi all you people out there in Collective land. It’s me, Scott G, here to present our pick for November 2020, which is also the last of the double album round. As you know, Alain picked our last band, Frankie Goes to Hollywood. This was right up my alley because I’ve spent a lot of time with 80s and 90s Brit synth and pop.
I was really torn on what to pick for this round. Looking through a bunch of top-10 lists there were a lot of great options. I was leaning heavily towards Bruce Springsteen’s The River, Led Zeppelin, Pink Floyd…lots of solid, safe picks.
But stretching out into top 50 lists, the band M83 caught my eye. First, because the name was unusual, and as far as I could tell I’d never even heard of them before. Their double album’s from 2011 and is called Hurry up, we’re dreaming.
Coming off a Brit synth pop from the 80s, I thought it’d be cool to pair it with some more synth from 30 years later and across the channel. Will there be cultural differences we can detect in the album? Will there be an evolution we can trace back? How will it feel coming off an overtly sexually charged album into something more atmospheric?
Their sixth studio album, coming in at a tight 73 minutes, I’m really hoping for a polished and deeply immersive double record. I don’t usually listen to a lot of ambient music, and I hope this is as new and interesting for you all as it will be for me.
So with that, let’s start our journey together with the Sonic Collective’s November, 2020 pick: M83’s 2011 double album, Hurry up, we’re dreaming. See you at the end month.
Links
Other albums considered
The River – Bruce Springsteen
Generation Terrorists – Manic Street Preachers
Daydream Nation – Sonic Youth
There’s a period of time called “The Golden Age of Hip Hop” that spans from the mid 80s to the mid 90s. Our previous picks, including Afrika Bambataa, A Tribe Called Quest, The Beastie Boys, Public Enemy and Dr. Dre all come from this period of time. I was about 21 coming out of that stretch of time, and I’m sure it had a deeply formative effect on my musical tastes and maybe even my world view.
Despite similar hairstyles in the 80s, Def Leppard and Celine Dion are worlds apart when it comes to love ballads, but if you caught from last month’s review I already had hair metal on the mind, this pick might not be as big a surprise for you.
They say the intention was to create a similar to Michael Jackson’s Thriller, where every song could be a single, and the fact seven of the twelve tracks actually did chart shows how successful they were in this goal. Rolling stone ranks the album in their top 500 of all time, and the top hair metal album of all time.
The songs she sang were off the groups recently released album “Lungs” and after a couple plays, I settled into the habit of pulling the singles out and adding them to my play lists and not really thinking of the album as a whole. Well, the time’s come to do what the collective does best and dig in and experience the album as a whole. Reading up, it sounded like Florence had a very long, very winding road to land to the sound she landed on for this debut album. I’m going to be watching for whether this represents a culmination of those effort, or does she sound like she’s still exploring even within the bounds of the album.
Ashley’s a fiddler from Nova Scotia that exploded onto the Canadian scene in 1996 with his most-critically acclaimed and commercially successful album, “Hi How are you Today”.
The sixth studio album and the first to feature The Revolution, it’s sold over 25 million albums worldwide and is the third best-selling soundtrack behind Whitney Houston’s the Bodyguard and The Bee Gee’s Saturday Night fever.