Where others might cast aside much of ‘80s music as mere pop detritus to satirize or ape with heaps of grinning irony, the Antibes, France electronic and sometimes ambient new waver, Anthony Gonzalez, sees the potential to mine the emotive peaks and valleys of his youth. Well, not his actual youth but his musical youth. The M83 frontman, now 26, was definitely not alive to properly hear the shoegaze touchstones (Cocteau Twins, Kate Bush, Tears For Fears) he obviously fawns so much over on Saturdays=Youth. Who’s to say his version, with all the warts/advantages of adult nostalgia is wrong though? The Molly Ringwald look-alike on the cover of the album is no red herring. Gonzalez is definitely nodding towards the myopic teen sincerity of John Hughes’ teen movies, The Breakfast Club and Sixteen Candles on the goth-meets-jock love story of “Graveyard Girl.”

The female protagonist’s monologue certainly zeros in on the burning fascination that some teenagers have with death: “I’ll read poetry to the stones/maybe one day I could be one of them/wise and sky-lit/waiting for someone to love me/waiting for someone to kiss me/I’m 15-years-old and I feel it’s already to late to live/don’t you?” That fiery emotionalism is a mainstay on an album that’s ready-made for the kind of head-full-of-dreams night drives that Hughes’ teenagers might take after learning first hand about social stereotypes or toying with drugs for the first time.

In fact one song is about just that. “Kim & Jessie” chronicle two teenaged girls (the ‘80s loved their disenfranchised female leads) sharing their first drug experience in clandestine quarters. If M83’s malaise was a bit heavy-handed on older tracks like “Teenage Angst,” here it feels like those anchors plummet from the clouds. The synth-laden theatrics is the sound of an adolescent free-fall but bolstered by a steady melody. Eat your heart out Digital Shades Vol. 1. Gonzalez admirably succeeds in culling the best parts of his two-way-mirror version of youth by using the unbounded emotional poles of his inspirations while jettisoning some of the aesthetic baggage he’s been accruing over five albums and eight years as M83.

On the dark and sexy “Skin of The Night” reverb-drenched guitar teeter on the edge of balls-out kitsch but the swirls of a slick synthetic ether and drum machines is retro in a good way. The same could be said of the icy vocals of Kate Bush’s vocal successor (The dulcet voice of Morgan Kibby (singer of the LA band Romanovs) on “Skin of The Night” and “Up!” In an all-too-perfect course of events, his film director friend Eva Husson introduced Gonzalez to Kibby’s theatrical voice. Gonzalez composed the soundtrack to Husson’s forthcoming feature, Tiny Dancer.

Speaking of theatricality, the first single off this album, the pulsating “Couleurs,” is about as sleek as that car from Knight Rider. The quavering cymbals, twitchy cowbell, and hectic drum pad programming tap into the adrenalin glands. Songs like the electrified shoegazer “We Own The Sky” light upon Kibby’s ethereal voice with arcs of ennui. The essential part of all of this is that Gonzalez comes fast and hard with his building tension and quaking releases this time. Sure there are the almost ambient sections of “Highway of Endless Dreams” that may bore some, but they serve the spacey female protagonists’ bold proclamation well, “I’m going to drive until it burns my bones.”

The producing touch of Ken Thomas (known for his work with Sigur Rós, The Sugarcubes, Cocteau Twins and Suede) and German producer Ewan Pearson (Tracey Thorn, The Rapture and Ladtron) certainly helps impel Gonzalez’s penchant for extravagance into easily digestible portions on this teenage daydream. So out of the daydreams, teenagers get a lot of crap for being snotty and obnoxious (God knows they are), but think about their sad and lucky situation. Not unlike a teenager grasping with the impending death of their childhood, Saturdays=Youth celebrates our formative years as much as it tries to numb us to the metastasizing reality that the hopeful world of adolescence is all too aware it soon will only be able to remember a facsimile of the real sublime thing.

Now all of Saturdays=Youth’s touchstones are perfectly fine but they definitely beg for the question of whether Gonzalez is just another string of electronic and shoegaze musicians that love to fetishize not only youth but its memetic counterpart ”“ the ‘80s. He certainly is not one of "those artists" but it depends on how you view his latest effort. Unlike recent '80s-influenced music (Neon Neon comes to mind) Anthony Gonzalez wants to underscore the fact that he’s appropriating a feeling first and foremost. He notices the emotional similarities between the grandiose gestures of the ‘80s and childhood and nudges them further together. The true hero of the day is melody though ”“ the best friend for teenagers and wannabe-teenagers in any decade. 81%