Compilations can be a difficult thing to assess. In addition to the quality of the music collected, other factors are in play: Is the record necessary? Who is it for? What do these particular songs articulate about their creator? For most Saint Etienne fans, the news that the eclectic trio was releasing the 2xCD 35-track London Conversations set was likely met with..."another compilation?" (A single-disc version that even newcomers should forgo for the 2xCD set, and a package with a DVD of videos are also available.) The band has already issued the succinct early singles collection Too Young to Die, the 2xCD 34-track Smash the System, and Sub Pop's U.S.-only single-disc treatment Travel Edition. When I first learned about this set, and saw its title, I gave them the benefit of the doubt and assumed that it might be a collection of songs about the England capitol-- not a far-fetched notion from a group who has already created a film about London and for two decades has deftly balanced the shifting, increasingly multicultural, cosmopolitan, and dance-influenced nature of London and its popular culture with the romantic, 1960s, mod notion of the city.
Alas, this is not a theme-centric cross-section of Saint Etienne's work. (And, wtc, it continues the group's streak of omitting one of its best songs, "London Belongs to Me", from these career-spanning discs.) In fact, the core of this set doesn't stray far from Smash the System's tracklist-- not adjusting for different mixes and edits, 12 songs from Smash are left out, with 13 new additions taking their places, most of them recorded since the earlier set was released. That's not much of a surprise; most of Saint Etienne's best tracks were recorded in the first half of the 1990s, and any compilation of their work without the overwhelming majority of the group's first 14 singles would be a poor intro. The hook here for longtime fans is the CD debut of "Lover Plays the Bass", a limited 7" release, but, considering the depth and breadth of Saint Etienne's career, it's not a track that should leave one wanting to pay for this set in order to acquire it.
Of these compilations, it's the "breadth" thing that's always bothered me about Saint Etienne and how they're viewed. It's been more than 15 years now since the release of their first two albums, Foxbase Alpha (1991) and So Tough (1993)-- both immediate entries into the indie hipster 101 at the time but talked about more infrequently since. Those two records, and the sadly less-considered 1994 follow-up Tiger Bay and Japanese-only 1997 release Continental represent the high point of the band's career, and despite the high quality of their singles, the records are an immersive amalgamation of decades' worth of non-guitar music. To be reductive, people label them a "pop" or "dance" band; nothing wrong with being either, but those fail to capture the effortless way Saint Etienne have molded 40 years of record-collector music such as Northern soul, dub, Tropicália, disco, girl-group music, exotica, incidental music, and French pop with more contemporary sounds like acid house, techno, Balearic, and Swedish pop. To put it another way: The simplistic tags also fail to capture how the group has flitted easily from name-dropping insiders to wizened scene vets and from delicate and blissed-out to robust and upbeat, or how they've played with notions of wit, artifice, style, and and approachable everyday glamor.
In the time since, the group has stuttered a bit, releasing less-immediate records that tend to sound better in hindsight. Of those, 1998's Good Humor on Sub Pop is surely the most well-known in the U.S., and you'll find people who actually claim that's their favorite Etienne record (possibly in part because it was the intro-- hey, we all do that) which is a bit mental. Both Humor and 2000's The Sound of Water have high highs-- particularly the latter, with "How We Used to Live" and "Heart Failed (In the Back of a Taxi)"-- but on the whole they've been bested by the group's relatively low-key yet cohesive work since. Truthfully though-- despite the conceptual bents that bind Finisterre (2002) and Tales From Turnpike House (2005)-- this comp does an excellent job of picking and choosing from the past 10 years of Saint Etienne's output, and for the uninitiated or less curious could serve as a proper substitution for the entire thing.
Which brings us back to those questions at the top of the review. Fanboy nitpicking aside, when it comes down to it, the most important one-- Who is this for?-- doesn't apply to me, or to anyone else who actually knew what the hell "Lover Plays the Bass" was prior to a few paragraphs ago. And, for those who want to dip their toes in, this is an excellent place to start. At its best, the music is almost unimpeachable-- songs like "Avenue", "You're in a Bad Way", "Like a Motorway", "Mario's Cafe", and "He's on the Phone", among many others, deserve to be considered modern classics. It's an incomplete picture of the group to be sure, but that's going to be inevitable when it comes to packaging two discs from a band this exploratory and in tune to shifting styles and moods. With the band strongly rumored to be releasing 2xCD versions of its albums in the near future, the time to properly reassess and fully explore Saint Etienne could soon arrive. In the meantime, if you need to get acquainted you should do so asap.
