I've had this album for about a month or so which means that for the less criminally minded and slightly more moral DiSer this is all a bit premature, still I wanted to make a few points before the inevitable review.

Is it any good? Well yes it is (at times, it's very good indeed). But is it too long? The answer I'm afraid is, yes it is (far too long).

I have an admiration for the artist who releases a double LP. I'd also like to point out that the reason that 'Hurry Up, We're Dreaming' doesn't work (IMO) isn't simply because there's a lot of 'transitional stuff', there's also an awful lot of filler - tracks which aren't that good frankly. Double albums are ambitious but they're also risky as hell and very few of them are successful so I didn't really have much hope for this. They require a lot of the listener's time and most people have a limited attention span. The 10- 12 track convention works for a very good reason. If you're going to demand someone gives up more than an hour of their time then you better have an album full to the brim of outstanding stuff. Sadly HUWD just doesn't have the goods to justify it's length.

That's not to say that it doesn't have some excellent tracks but it's sad and annoying that some restraint couldn't have been shown here because they're almost swamped here and these little gems are almost lost. Almost but not entirely.

Of course 'saturdays=youth' ended with a repetitious drone and so there's always been a sense that M83 overindulges a bit. This last track was always the most frustrating thing about S=Y and the one taint in an otherwise superb LP. That is why I used some music production software to trim the last track to about 1:50 where it simply fades out. What you have then is the album that should have been.

In the same way, things are not lost here. A bit of editing involving one track moved to a different position and we can have a very fine LP indeed. This is what I'm working with right now and it really does make a big difference.

1. Intro (ft.Zola Jesus)
2. Midnight City
3. Reunion
4. Where The Boats Go
5. Wait
6. Train To Pluton
7. Claudia Lewis
8. Klaus I Love You
9. New Map
10. Ok Pal
11. Fountains
12. Steve McQueen
13. My Tears Are Becoming A Sea

Please not that the absence of some tracks on this list doesn't mean they were necessarily rubbish, it's just that I think this flow really nicely.

Give it a go people. There's definitely a good album hiding in there and I think this is mine. :0)

I'm sure DiS will give the album a good review because there's really good stuff here and it's wrong not to recgnise that but anything above 7/10 for me would be ignoring the basic fact that the choice of making this a double album was a mistake. An ambitious mistake and of course reaching for the sun is always a admirable but still we need to keep in mind that it didn't work here.

Or of course, that's what I think. I'll be interested to hear what others have got to say.