Foolhardily, we'd brazenly suggest experiencing this extended-play in reverse order so that you may fully appreciate its candied majesty, its heartwarming melancholia. Thus dive deep into the gushing, almost tidal spate of Closer Than This as within unassuming boy/girl vox assuredly affirm: "I've got a feeling we will never get closer than this." Batted back, forth, and back again, there's an open and involving intimacy to it all, and indeed musically it's as accesible as any M83 material. And that just about encompasses Midnight Girl. It's what Wolf Gang promised to be when they yowled out Lions In Cages and Back To Back, only to then turn their back on the great pop pact once made with the discerning listener. Before the Dive meanwhile sounds like Ultravox, The Rapture, and Yeasayer winging it on ITV's dreary Daybreak, extemporising expressively in a desperate, united attempt to haul the sun from out beyond sheets of darkness and doom and gloom and despair. There's then All Eyes On You. Drifting in and out of all sorts of saxual innuendo, it sounds like the sort of euphonious, gleaming nugget South Africa would wish FIFA had unearthed in place of Waka Waka.
Jiggling around with St. Lucia's tracklisting a little now, we turn to bounding, dazzling opener We Got it Wrong. Were Phil Collins (in infamous gorilla suit or otherwise) to have a stab at the genre coined to describe the indescribable Ariel Pink, well, it may sound half as outstanding as this.
However the truly magnum within the parvum is The Old House is Gone, another particularly buoyant affair that is as close to perfect a pop song as 2011 is ever to boast, even in its dying days. If this doesn't make you pine for piña colada and the shade of palms nowt will.
