M83: Junk review – nostalgia electronica, cheesy but refined

It’s an odd world that Anthony Gonzalez lives in. The Frenchman, releasing his sixth album as M83, writes songs full of nostalgia for an age that existed only on record. The 35-year-old claims to be fascinated by the years of his youth, and yet the music he makes refrains from the personal and cloaks itself instead in irony and appropriation. Here the points of reference are from the 70s and 80s. Atlantique Sud is a piano crooner that sounds like something Daft Punk might once have sampled. For the Kids is a saccharine 80s power ballad that pines after what could be a lost love but might actually be a dead child, if the lengthy coda of TV-movie dialogue is anything to go by. It’s fantasy stuff – evocative rather than perceptive, and awfully cheesy. But it’s also incredibly refined. The love and care that has gone into this ersatz rendering of a remembered past is quite overpowering. It’s like someone carving a bust of Jennifer Warnes in marble.