"Cinematic" is a word increasingly used to describe music that seems bigger than a conception of music alone can stand for — it's somehow visual, coming across in multiplex widescreen, expanding beyond "mere music" to become sound and vision. And so where M83's debut album was a beautiful, lushly pastoral electronic record, subtly and evocatively textured (a kind of laptop-gazing masterpiece), Before the Dawn Heals Us is defiantly "cinematic" and brash; it's stadium-sized and overwhelming.
Often, it's all too much — too many synths, too many drums, too much reverb; it's as if every subtlety of that first record was magnified in the production process, its once lithe and supple frame vulgarly pumped with steroids.
There are still those brilliant moments here — "Teen Angst" is one of the best songs released this year: its propulsive, arpeggio keyboards and understated vocals are backed by soaring synth lines and (relatively) subtle drum programming, the whole drifting in a beautifully dreamy melancholy. But where that song soars because of its lightness, too much of the remainder is overburdened with grandiosity to truly take flight.
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