Kevin Bronson on November 30th, 2008

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Where M83 transported you Saturday night largely depended on where you started. If you’re a child of the ’80s, Anthony Gonzalez and crew had you right where they wanted you — blithely sliding on a sheen of muscular synth back to the pre-Ritalin days of “The Breakfast Club,” that era before cynicism put a lid on your bottle of passion and screwed it on so tightly that barely an emoticon could escape.

But if you were younger (or older) — as many were in the shoulder-to-shoulder crowd at the Music Box @ Fonda — it wasn’t hard to ascend to a place far beyond the indistinct euphoria of psychedelia, or the mesmerizing stasis of trance, or the hip-tugging vamping of funk, or the fleeting bloodrush of techno, all of which are building blocks of the M83 oeuvre. The quartet’s 85-minute set ratcheted up all those elements and fashioned a prodigious soundscape that in other hands might have seemed a mountain of indulgence.

It was all about scale and pacing. Performing in front of a staged-sized backdrop of one of Anouck Bertin’s photographs and amid lighting that made me ashamed I forgot my glowsticks, M83 interspersed its vocal numbers with instrumentals. Frontman Gonzalez, who co-founded the band some eight years ago in Antibes, France, played madman guitarist and knob-twiddler, his outer-space rig facing bouncy singer-keyboardist Morgan Kibby. Pierre-Marie Maulini laid down bass in the shadows at left, with drummer Loic Maurin in back, partitioned off by sheets of Plexiglas so his rhythms would not bleed into the other microphones. The result was a clean sound, somehow very organic.

That warmth made for big drama — the slow build to “Kim & Jessie,” with Kibby improvising her harmonies at the end to great effect; the march toward “Graveyard Girl” and its “I’ll read poetry to the stones” spoken-word interlude; the wall of sound and light leading up to the disco-on-steroids “Couleurs.” All those tracks come from this year’s critically lauded “Saturdays=Youth.” That album represented a detour towards pop song structure for Gonzalez, yet the new songs had no problem fitting in with older material that, on record, may seem more aloof.

Two-thirds of the way through the show — the last of a U.S. tour before M83 departs for 15 December dates in the U.K. supporting Kings of Leon — I imagined Gonzalez’s tunes filling the Hollywood Bowl, backed by a full orchestra. It’s not a stretch, not for music that seems intent on escaping the gadgets that were used to create it.

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Opening act School of Seven Bells drew a big early crowd, thanks to the buzz behind its October release, “Alpinisms,” and the trio’s set was only a light show itself away from a waking dream. Dripping with reverb, SVIIB’s otherworldly shimmer owes to the three-pronged harmonics of synths, guitars and the vocals of fetching twins Alejandra and Claudia Deheza.

Only occasionally did (ex-Secret Machines) Ben Curtis’ guitars bare any teeth, but convergence, not juxtaposition, is what School of Seven Bells is all about. It’s meticulous music that perhaps is still struggling to find its rightful place outside the studio. Overall, that gave the band’s set limited emotional range, but if you’re one for wistful smiles, it was a mighty comfortable cocoon for 40 minutes.

Photos courtesy of Timothy Norris / LA Weekly; for a full slideshow of images from the evening, click here.