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118. M83 – Graveyard Girl

Nostalgia has always been an integral ingredient of popular music. From Ted Leo referencing 2 Tone ska to Grizzly Bear's nu-Pet Sounds, both popular and underground music tend to repeat the endeavors of the past with reverence. Sure, groundbreaking sounds are imperative to the art form, and most critics (and this list) reward the boldness of the new. But every year, there are acts that craft a loving tribute to a band, or an era, or a sound and update it just enough to make a meaningful and worthy memorial to something long gone . M83's 2008 album Saturdays=Youth is a perfect example.

Anthony Gonzalez, the electronic shoegaze genius behind M83 (and pretty much the whole band on album) openly admitted that his major influence on the album was not a specific band, but the classic 1980's teen films of John Hughes like Ferris Bueller, The Breakfast Club, and Sixteen Candles. This is the unlikely sound of a French solo electronic artist forming a reverent monument to a mainstream '80s American youth filmmaker. And it's beautiful. Mesmerizing. Tear-jerking. Everything that a good teensploitation film should be. And one of the best albums of the year.

"Graveyard Girl" is the beating heart of the album, a rollicking charger, the pulsing ode to a lonely, maladjusted teenage girl. A monotonous drum beat pushes the song forward through droning, colorful synth tones that add a layer of mist over, yes, synth vocal hits carrying the harmony. Even though I know he uses the most modern of technology to craft this music, I personally like envisioning Gonzalez slaving over one of the tiny Casio keyboards I used to make horrible pretentious mixes in my basement in 7th grade. Chiming guitars add guts to all the electronic heft when the chorus hits, and Gonzalez's overdubbed and reverb-drowned vocals float forward like a forlorn goth with a foreign exchange student-bad accent singing into a stargate. I know that makes no sense, but listen to the song and roll with it, you'll hear it.

And then halfway through the song, something beautifully cinematic happens. The galloping rythm drops out, and over weeping keyboards, the young girl, taken directly from the oeuvre of a Hughes film speaks. "I'm 15 years old, and I feel it's already too late to love, don't you?" The most melodramatic, immature, out-of-proportion shit ever. But don't lie to me, you felt that. You sat by yourself at some point, assuming you must be depressed, wanting to be left alone and wanting nothing more than to not be alone and thinking you always would be. There's even a school bell faintly ringing in the background, certainly an ode to The Breakfast Club, Sixteen Candles, the location for every Hughes masterpiece and every personal masterpiece of a memory that the song recalls. For 30 seconds, M83 dissolves everything there is to being a lonely American teenager not just in the '80s but in the electronic world of today, pours it out all over electronics equipment and commits it all to tape. And in a fitting ode to John Hughes, Gonzalez manages to portray the essence of all his films in a 30 second burst of emotional, quiet sadness from a girl that you can do nothing but connect with even through inane immaturity, if even only for the length of a song.