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Oct 13, 2011It's a fantastical story of aliens, spirits, and children told by one breathtakingly gifted artist, and it's utterly remarkable.
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Oct 17, 2011Gonzalez has crafted an admirable paean to fuzzy memories, nostalgia, melancholic rumination and pop experimentation, imploring the listener to become the stories and places that populate dreams.
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Oct 17, 2011Above all else, it's the best M83 record yet.
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Oct 18, 2011In its execution, the record is near flawless, an essential distillation of the sounds of Gonzalez's youth, nostalgia and melancholy and happiness all mixed up into a sparkling pop stew.
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Oct 17, 2011With less of the anxiety that marked his earlier albums, that world is a joy to get lost in over and over.
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Oct 17, 2011It sounds like a soundtrack for the end of the world, or the birth of new worlds. Extraordinary.
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Oct 17, 2011A remarkable accomplishment.
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Oct 12, 2011In the M83 universe, emotion comes before logic, and for all 72 fascinating minutes, Gonzalez has you in the palm of his sweaty hand.
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Oct 17, 2011At this point, it's hard to know what to let go and what to hold onto as a listener of M83, but regardless, Hurry Up, We're Dreaming is a pretty fantastic record.
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Entertainment WeeklyNov 15, 2011Gonzalez wraps both hooks and hallucinations in bubbly melodies only occasionally bogged down by murky sprawl. [28 Oct 2011, p.73]
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Jan 3, 2012Gonzalez paints broad strokes on this vast musical landscape, and although a wee long, Hurry Up, We're Dreaming may be his conceptual masterpiece.
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Q MagazineNov 8, 2011Gonzales works with subsonic electronics, shoegazey ambiance and lush orchestration to create a wildly ambitious, often visionary record. [Nov. 2011, p. 136]
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Nov 7, 2011The key success of Hurry Up is that his canvas has exponentially increased in size.
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Nov 3, 2011There is plenty of [crescendos], but Gonzalez also proves adept at pacing, surrounding M83's bigger, more anthemic moments with ambient instrumental interludes and balladic "comedown" tracks.
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Oct 28, 2011Gonzalez outdoes himself on Hurry Up, We're Dreaming: a double album in tribute to the hefty documents of pre-digital, pre-iTunes yesteryear.
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Oct 27, 2011Though taken individually some tracks may have a strikingly similar feel with a lot of big, synthy crescendos, it's the cohesion of the release that makes it work in the "epic" way that Gonzalez envisioned it.
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Oct 26, 2011Because of its ambition and grandeur, Hurry Up, We're Dreaming might get criticized for its long runtime, for trying too hard to achieve aesthetic balance and thematic coherency.
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Oct 18, 2011While it may not be quite as striking as Saturdays = Youth, it delivers a welcome mix of classic sounds and promising changes.
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Oct 17, 2011It's surprisingly exhilarating stuff.
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Oct 14, 2011The end result is an incredibly ambitious and personal effort that shines, sparkles, and thrills.
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Oct 11, 2011It's a sweeping, expansive album, that covers a lot of ground and leaves the listener satisfied.
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Oct 17, 2011With any dreams there are ups and downs, and the same can be said about Hurry Up, We're Dreaming.
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Oct 27, 2011The totality of sound on Hurry Up, We're Dreaming has a way of blinding even the most critical listener to the problems that underline many of the album's lesser songs--weak choruses, unfinished ideas, and a repetition of previously successful formulas.
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Oct 18, 2011The album is ambitious and brimming with all sorts of stray ideas, but it's also suited to Gonzalez's expansive gifts.
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Oct 17, 2011Hurry Up, We're Dreaming is itself the Little Prince: guileless and dreamy. Quite a bold statement to make, but this is an album of equal valour.
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Oct 13, 2011Hurry Up, We're Dreaming may have its flaws, but minor niggles aside it is a testament to the fine songwriting skill of Gonzalez.
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Oct 12, 2011While some consistency may have been sacrificed in favour of a space-filling selection of tracks, this set still represents a heaving, breathing journey through the introspective and the bombastic, the striving and the exhaustive.
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Oct 11, 2011Gonzalez sings mostly about memories (occasionally unintelligibly), but refuses to accept that some dramatic gifts don't necessarily have to be exhausting. Still, the album is full of goose-bump moments
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Oct 18, 2011For an album of such impressive scale and nanoscopic attention to detail, Dreams leaves a surprisingly light impression.
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Oct 26, 2011The cacophony raised by this album is not so much the kind that unsettles us in important and challenging ways, but is the commercial noise of a spectacle without a center, of emotion so generic we are instantly desensitized to it.
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MojoDec 22, 2011The trade-off for this grandiloquent approach is that some of the songcraft has been swept away in the surge. [Nov 2011, p.93]
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UncutOct 18, 2011After a moment of comparative restraint he returns with a double album so spectacularly grandiose you have to wear 3D specs to hear it properly. [Nov 2011, p.91]
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Oct 18, 2011When it's not luring you to the dance floor with thrilling 1980s pop, M83's widescreen music either sounds like a lost John Hughes movie ("Soon, My Friend," with its sweeping sunset synths, needs Molly Ringwald complaining over it) or gets trippy.
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Oct 17, 2011Never shy of delivering an electro cri de coeur where a simple chord progression will do, Anthony "M83" Gonzalez fully indulges his fondness for the grand gesture on his sixth record.
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Oct 11, 2011There's a lot of slightly tedious ambient wallpaper. Sure, it works to unite an otherwise diverse set of songs, but you can't help but think there's a much better play list waiting to be whittled down.
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Oct 13, 2011Double albums are necessarily somewhat hit and miss. That's part of their pick'n'mix charm. But M83 mostly miss me here.
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Oct 12, 2011Ultimately Hurry Up, We're Dreaming sounds much more like an M83 wannabe's poor imitation than the real deal.
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Nov 3, 2011A single CD's worth on two discs, Hurry Up indulges many watery washes ("Wait") but restrains sound collage use ("Echoes of Mine") in waiting for another 21st century merry-go-round ("New Map").
Awards & Rankings
User score distribution:
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Positive: 204 out of 223
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Mixed: 9 out of 223
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Negative: 10 out of 223
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Mar 26, 2013
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Oct 18, 2011
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Jun 18, 2012