Dead Cities, Red Seas & Lost Ghosts

The subtractive test bites more often here than on the strongest albums of the kind. The frame is compelled. Birds is the threshold, a short swell that lets the record begin in mid-air; Unrecorded states the method, a drum machine under a rising synthesiser wall, more plainly than anything later does; Run Into Flowers is the record’s one approach to song; and Lower Your Eyelids to Die with the Sun is the end the whole is built toward, an accumulation that works only after so much drift. In the middle the test bites several times. Cyborg and 0078h read as interludes and sketches that hold a mood without adding a turn, and two or three of the slower atmospheres repeat one another’s swell and release. A shorter sequence would lose little. The cap is met, and only just.

Score: 7.5 / 10

Disclosure through sound is credited fully, and the record does disclose something: enormity felt from inside a small room, the adolescent sense that private feeling is as large as weather and as ruinous as the dead cities of the title. Unrecorded and the close make that feeling audible as scale, a wall of synthesisers rising past the point of comfort, and it is exact and recognisable. The title proposes more: apocalypse, a sea turned to blood, ghosts, in the register of a child’s imagining of catastrophe. What is disclosed stays a mood. No human or social condition is articulated; the words are too few and too buried to carry a claim, and the sound does not turn the mood into a meaning, as Low turns wordlessness into a city and an exile.

Score: 7.2 / 10

Elevation is the record’s purpose and its chief good, and it comes often. Unrecorded rises early and steeply, its synthesiser mass climbing over a hard machine beat into something grand and almost triumphal: the first height. Run Into Flowers reaches a quieter, brighter one, tenderness at full volume. The slow pieces have a cold, wide beauty, the sense of looking down from a height at lights. Lower Your Eyelids to Die with the Sun is the summit, a long build that keeps adding weight until the sound becomes a storm, the dreadful sublime of the title’s death in the sun, and then a release. What holds the figure is the repetition of one means, the swell, so that by the middle the heights are anticipated, and several of the shorter pieces stay level, held in atmosphere without ascent.

Score: 8.3 / 10

Myth is evoked and not built. The title lays out a field of archetypes, the ruined city, the sea turned red, the ghosts that remain, and the titles of the pieces add the church, the lake beneath a mountain, the cyborg, the birds: a landscape after the end, half sacred and half science fiction. The music gives these a weather, not a structure. No figure bears them and no passage moves between them as stages of a story; In Church is a mood of reverence, not a rite, and Cyborg a texture, not a body. One frame is real: an arc from flight in Birds to dying into light at the close, from the morning of the record to its sunset, which gives the whole its shape. It remains atmosphere laid over the order of the pieces.

Score: 6.9 / 10

The inheritance is twofold: the guitar walls of British shoegaze, My Bloody Valentine, Slowdive and Ride, and the synthesiser pop and film music of the 1980s, with the French electronic music of the late 1990s as the immediate setting. The turn was to build the shoegaze wall chiefly from synthesisers, to let a drum machine drive it, and to aim the whole at the grand emotional scale of film scores rather than at the introversion of the indie record. That is a real departure from both sources, audible from Unrecorded onward. The stake was modest. The duo had made one quiet album on a small label and had no public to lose, and the move was not lonely, since others in the same years were making shoegaze from electronics. A turn of real distance on paths already open.

Score: 7.4 / 10

Change the form and much of what the record knows goes, because it knows size through sound: the stacked synthesisers, the compression that makes the mass press on the ear, the voices sunk so deep that they become part of the weather. Run Into Flowers as a plain guitar song would know only its melody; its meaning is the scale of the arrangement around a small voice. The close needs its length, since the knowledge is in the accumulation. The sequence is counted here once: Birds’ short ascent, Unrecorded’s statement, a middle of drifts and interludes, and the long end. The arc holds at its ends and sags in the middle, where the form becomes a container for pieces that could be reordered without loss: a form that is the content at its peaks and arbitrary in its interior.

Score: 7.8 / 10

The evidence over twenty-three years is modest. The record has kept a devoted audience and is often returned to as the duo’s high point, before M83 became Gonzalez’s larger and more popular project, and the mixes repay attention: layers of synthesiser and guitar separate on close listening, and buried voices surface. But the formal depth is mainly density, and density is not yield; once heard, the swell and its release are known. The semantic depth is thin, since the words are few and the titles give images without a meaning to return to. No book-length study, no reworking across idioms and no tradition of reinterpretation is known to have reopened it. The record means on the tenth hearing roughly what it meant on the first, felt more fully.

Score: 7.1 / 10

The field is the electronic and indie music of the early 2000s. The intrinsic force is real and bounded: the record showed that the shoegaze wall could be made from synthesisers and a drum machine and pitched at cinematic scale, and in that it widened the idiom; it did not reorganise it, since the elements were known and others were joining them at the same time. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the plainest line runs through M83 itself, whose later work as Gonzalez’s project carried this sound to a far larger public, but that reach belongs to the later records and only part of it passes back here; beyond the band the record is often named among the sources of the electronic strand of the later shoegaze revival, but no particular record can be shown to have turned on it, and unnamed reach is credited little.

Score: 7.0 / 10

Survival is weighed over twenty-three years, on form, then presence, then fabric. The form is whole and legible: the recording survives as released and has been reissued, and nothing of the work is lost. Presence is continuous but narrow. The record has stayed in print and in listening, sustained more by the later fame of M83 than by its own reach, and its public is devoted rather than wide; that narrowness holds the figure below what the span alone would give. The fabric carries its moment: the synthesiser timbres and heavy compression of the home studio of the early 2000s are audible as such, and the cinematic epic manner has since become common, so that parts of the record sound like the anticipation of a later cliché. That is not charged heavily: the form and the feeling have outlasted the timbres.

Score: 8.3 / 10

Command of the recorded medium, with the words weighed elsewhere. The duo built large, layered sound with limited means, and the layering is skilled: in Unrecorded the beat and the synthesiser mass are set so that the wall rises without swallowing the rhythm, and the close is paced so that each addition is heard. Run Into Flowers balances a fragile voice inside a large arrangement. The costs are several. The mix is often crowded and compressed to the point of fatigue, so that dynamic range, the means of the sublime in a long build, is spent early; the palette is narrow, the same pads and swells across many pieces; some interludes sound like unfinished sketches rather than made things; and the live drums, where used, are less exact than the machine. Load-bearing at the peaks, not throughout.

Score: 8.0 / 10

One law governs: private feeling rendered at the scale of catastrophe, through stacked synthesiser and a slow swell to release. The two most distant elements obey it. Birds is a short passage of rising air and the close is a long storm; Run Into Flowers is a small song inside a large sound, Cyborg a cold textural piece; all are the same feeling heard at different sizes. The coherence is real, and the record never contradicts itself. But narrowness is not coherence, and the range covered is narrow: one register, grand, nostalgic and nocturnal, one method and one emotional temperature from first piece to last. The law is kept because few things are asked of it. This is a consistent record more than a governed one.

Score: 7.8 / 10

Judged on what the record holds. Consciousness is held, as one young sensibility’s sense of the vastness of its own feeling. The natural order is evoked through titles and sound: birds, sea, lake, mountain, sun. The city is named in the title and given a ruin, not a life. The sacred is touched in In Church, as a mood. Technology is present as the medium and in the figure of the cyborg. What holds the figure low is that none of these is held as an order of reality with its own weight: they are images within one feeling, listed by the titles more than integrated by the music, and the family, labour, the state, history and other people are absent. One consciousness and a weather of images, which is the scale of the form as this record uses it, and above the floor.

Score: 6.2 / 10