Despite a pretty sturdy background in electronic music, the buzz surrounding Frenchman Anthony Gonzalez's M83 has been centered on his affinity for the texture of hazy shoegaze guitars. As last heard on 2005's Before the Dawn Heals Us... the one man band continued veering towards pyrotechnic riffs and bleeding heart vocal melodrama while inching slightly away from compositions driven by beats or centered on ambient waves of keyboard foam. But based on the scant evidence provided by the first track from of Spring 2008's Saturday = Youth record, perhaps the rock stops here.

The amorphous fog hanging over this eight and a half minute slow burn is primarily synthetic and its dominant thump surprisingly club ready. You can almost make out some lonely amp feedback in there somewhere, but as the rhythm continues to assert itself in the track's fourth and fifth minutes it's swallowed completely. While I hesitate to say that the track is an improvement over the previous model, I'm digging the forward momentum achieved when Gonzalez's blurred sonics snap into sharper focus.