M83

With songwriting partner Nicolas Fromageau, Frenchman Anthony Gonzales composed 2003's highly lauded Dead Cities, Red Seas & Lost Ghosts,an album of supernal, keyboard-filtered, foot pedal-chipped, postrock hymnals. Fans of My Bloody Valentine, Jean Michel Jarre, and Parisian children's choirs could all find something to appreciate. Now Gonzales sans Fromageau (but enlisting a studio drummer and bassist) has returned with Before the Dawn Heals Us, an album that's as hypnotically dense and celestially viscous as the first, yet more terrestrial. Gonzalez has produced a fifteen-track collection cast across a silken cinematic ambit but following more tautly to vocal and guitar melody lines. The result is prone to heaving pageantry, chasmal and moving.