When last we heard from Saint Etienne, on last year's near-miss Places to Visit EP, they were doing their best Oedipa Maas impersonation. There they were, locked in some motel room with Jim O'Rourke, likely wrapped in untold layers of protective clothing, and engaged in elaborate tricks to avoid actually giving anything up. That release, while occasionally enjoyable, was hobbled by its unwillingness to make good on any of its promises.
Thankfully, Sound of Water manages to pull off exactly what Places to Visit hinted at. The album follows the EP's trajectory by marrying Saint Etienne's signature pop smoothness with a slightly more avant-garde spirit. But where its predecessor was thin, rough and square Sound of Water is entirely the opposite. It's a fully realized implementation of Places to Visit's frustrating, if enticing, unfinished experiment.
Don't go getting crazy ideas in your head, though. We're talking about Saint Etienne here, not Nurse with Wound. There are no 15-minute stretches of eldritch rattling noises here. When I say "avant-garde spirit," what I really mean is "glossy avant-garde sheen." This isn't to say that their version of experimentalism is false, hollow or cautious, but they're not going to forget what they're all about. Which, as we all know, is style.
The end result is an album filled with great pop songs that have been augmented with some fairly non-standard beeps, clunks and whirs. The album is cohesive enough to allow that conceit, and none of those non-standard noises sound forced or tacked on. The songs flow effortlessly along, and even the instrumental tracks are fully developed-- none suffer from the half-finished feel that made Places to Visit so dissatisfying. Much of the credit for this can probably be attributed to the band's collaborators To Rococo Rot and Sean O'Hagan who provide squirm-style effects and string arrangements, respectively.
The record's standout moments come with the borderline balladry of "Sycamore," with its naturalistic acoustic guitar and backwards cymbals, the especially beepy-clunky-whirry (but still hooky) "Don't Back Down," and the nine-minute opus "How We Used to Live." Beyond that, the record is generally enjoyable, if still somewhat similar to previous efforts.
As with past Saint Etienne albums, Sound of Water is ear-candy all the way through. Still, they've managed to add a layer of subtlety and novelty beneath the glossiness-- or at least they've managed to coat their stylish exterior with a couple extra-thick layers of varnish. Either way, the result is the same as always: a pretty tasty album, even if its shelf-life may not eternal.
