Saint Etienne's first album in seven years, this year's Words and Music by Saint Etienne, is pop music of and about loving pop music. In a less direct way, though, that description could just as easily apply to the London group's entire discography. Landmark albums like 1991's Foxbase Alpha, 1993's So Tough, and 1994's Tiger Bay combine a connoisseur's stylish adventurousness with a true fan's endearingly quaint romanticism. Whether 1960s girl groups, 90s Euro-house, or state-of-2012 electro-pop, Saint Etienne aren't ones to let shiny prettiness go to waste.
The last two entries in Saint Etienne's four-year deluxe series make for one hell of a victory lap. Casino Classics, an update of a 1996 remix collection, and Lipslide, singer Sarah Cracknell's 1997 solo debut, are both far more than the afterthoughts such phrases might suggest. Each vividly represent Saint Etienne's far-flung interests-- their cosmopolitan, dance-oriented side and their more domestic, Burt Bacharach-leaning side-- though not necessarily the one you might think. Most importantly, diehard Saint Etienne fans who've already picked up all of the other reissues have no reason to stop here, and curious newcomers shouldn't have to feel daunted, either.
Casino Classics would be notable for historical reasons alone, but happily its top-notch remixers-- and top-notch remix material-- still easily hold their own in this post-EDM era. As a group whose first single, and first hit, converted Neil Young's "Only Love Can Break Your Heart" into dubby Eurodisco, Saint Etienne have never been strangers to the dance realm, and the original 2xCD, 3xLP release was both stacked and prescient. The Chemical Brothers' distinctively block-rocking take on Tiger Bay's krautrock-sleek standout "Like a Motorway", for instance, came out here the same month a little song called "Setting Sun" hit UK No. 1. Underworld's sprawling space-out on the bass riff from the same album's wordless "Cool Kids of Death" just after Trainspotting-famous "Born Slippy .NUXX" made its own rise up the charts.
The complete reissue, including two limited-edition bonus discs, adds more than 30 tracks to the original, though nothing from this year's Words and Music. As unwieldy as this approach is for listening all the way through, which I can't recommend trying, it's a smart way of making as much quality material available to fans as possible, and it offers plenty to cherry-pick. Aphex Twin's two 1993-era appearances-- an Eastern-tinged disemboweling of non-album single "Who Do You Think You Are" (a cover with its own intriguing history), and its glitchy, textured B-side-- aren't exactly typical "dance" music, but they're enveloping glimpses of an artist who hadn't yet released Selected Ambient Works Volume II. Broadcast's eerily cinematic "Angel" remix came out before the English outfit's first Warp compilation.
Among the new additions, DJ Tiësto's remix of "Action," originally from 2002's Finisterre, captures the song's return-to-the-clubs feeling-- and also captures Tiësto before he started raking in a reported $22 million annually. And Richard X's reworking of "Method of Modern Love", the only all-new song from Saint Etienne's 2009 best-of compilation London Conversations and one he produced and co-wrote only amps up his subject's ur-pop pleasures, something like his wonderful remix of Cassie's recent "King of Hearts". When you throw in a couple of the preexisting comp's standout tracks, such as a breathtaking reworking of Tiger Bay Eurodisco-mainliner "He's on the Phone" by Motiv 8 (who did an excellent remix of Spice Girl's "Wannabe" around the same time) and Andrew Weatherall's dub-exploring revamp of "Only Love Can Break Your Heart", it's instructive that so much of what might seem like a leftfield digression for Saint Etienne also underscores their pop charms.
Cracknell's solo Lipslide might seem like the opposite of a remix album, but it winningly isn't so different after all. Like the remixers, Cracknell is making Saint Etienne's songs her own, though unlike them she does so in a style that's not unlike the group's usual approach. After all, she didn't sing on Saint Etienne's first singles, and in a trio with the former music journalists Bob Stanley and Pete Wiggs, her role must've been easy for a sometimes chauvinistic critical establishment to discount unfairly. Recorded between her main outfit's masterful electro-folk hybrid Tiger Bay and 1998's Swedish indie pop-indebted Good Humor, Lipslide asserts Cracknell's rockist bona fides in the least rockist way possible: She co-writes every song, but they're are unabashedly soft and quotidian, decked out in synths and strings rather than muscular guitars or middlebrow approximations of depth. It's the supposedly interchangeable vocalist reaffirming that the supposedly interchangeable is what really matters anyway.
The 2xCD deluxe edition might surprise some US listeners by mainly restoring the alternate, UK tracklist for the main disc; while a couple of the US-only tracks, such as "Aussie Soap Girl", find their way to the bonus disc, not all do. That's probably for the best, as the original lineup makes for a more cohesive listen. "I don't want the hotels/ I don't want the bars," she sings on first single "Anymore", a hybrid of contemporary synth-pop and swinging London mod in the finest Saint Etienne mold, and that sets the tone for the album. Swaying opener "Ready or Not" hovers lovingly over the banal details-- books to lend, friends who got engaged-- in a conversation with a heartbroken friend, lite club-thumper "Home" hints at the romantic anguish between workaday life, and "Can't Stop Now" is Dusty Springfield-ish "daydreaming that love is cool"-- basically the blueprint for later London indie-poppers Lucky Soul.
Even here, though, the triphoppy "Goldie", lithe electro-disco strutter "Taxi", or Madonna-buoyant synth-gospel ultimatum "If You Leave Me" could almost as easily fit on the other new Etienne-related reissue. Lipslide's bonus material is more varied, including a couple of demos and more acoustic-leaning tracks-- among them a previously unreleased team-up with Liverpool group Shack on their song "Miles Apart", which is elegant in a strummier way. The album doesn't completely follow the UK tracklist, either, as the baggier UK album version of "Home" makes a welcome appearance on the bonus disc. Saint Etienne fans, like Smiths fans, are used to trawling through an overly complicated discography, and they do so because the rewards continue to be worth the search.
Saint Etienne's reissues series wraps up as their stance, consciously or not, appears to be gaining an increasing hold in the indie firmament. Take Elite Gymnastics' James Brooks, who has said he's trying to "rebuild my own canon where Joy Division or Radiohead doesn't matter but Tori Amos or Sarah McLachlan or the Spice Girls or George Michael or Des'ree or the Romeo + Juliet soundtrack do matter." Or the likes of CFCF and LOL Boys, whose recent "Changes" remix together wrings real emotion out of layer after layer of self-consciously "artificial" references. As long as we're talking about dance-informed, left-of-center, sincerely entertaining pop that refuses to kowtow to the cults of authenticity, poe-faced seriousness, or the virtues of difficulty over pleasure, Saint Etienne have to be part of the conversation. Their lesson, as ever (with all the requisite postmodern provisos): Only love can break your heart.
