At the wedding of a childhood friend, my mother got up and danced harder than I’d ever seen in my entire life. The DJ was mixing a fairly aggressive set of Lebanese dabke music, and somehow, between the poignance of the occasion, the beat’s unfamiliar pulse, and the stuttering flash of a strobe light, I caught a glimpse of her as she was at 20 years old. As soon as I registered what I was witnessing, the track broke away and the lights went down. A disco ball glinted across the room and illuminated her face, and though the years had caught up with her, the continuity between her many lives seemed to linger. After what felt like a small eternity, the present reasserted itself with a needle scratch, a roaring crowd, and another pummeling rush of noise.
Music’s ability to suspend, sustain, and reverse time is one of its most powerful and mysterious qualities. The philosopher Susanne Langer believed that this property of “time made audible” was essential to the colorful, parallel dimensions that music can conjure. It also helps explain the wormhole effect, in which moments (and even years) can be compressed into a handful of notes and sprung again in an instant. Few musicians have understood these dynamics as masterfully as Saint Etienne. Since the early 1990s, Bob Stanley, Pete Wiggs, and Sarah Cracknell have mapped the elements of dance music onto a listener’s most tender feelings of longing, optimism, and nostalgia. A song like early masterpiece “Avenue” echoes through the ages in real time, capturing a love affair in the crossfade between young abandon and adult knowingness. The only thing more remarkable than the track’s panorama of swirling memory and conflicted feeling is how brilliantly and consistently the band was able to conjure it throughout its records.
Over the course of more than three decades, Saint Etienne have matured with their music, and they have mostly used this longevity to their advantage. But for every song that’s grappled with an adult overview of human experience, on recent records they’ve struck a world-weary note, as though aware that more yesterdays than tomorrows await the three middle-aged musicians. With their 13th and final album, International, Saint Etienne aim to go out on top, with one more blaze of fun and passion in the spirit of their best work. It is a graceful but slightly anticlimactic grand finale: a victory lap over well-trodden ground that eagerly commands the spotlight before it goes out for good.
There isn’t a unifying theme or sound that defines International the way that The Night dabbled in ambient music or I’ve Been Trying to Tell You wove spells with plunderphonics. Nor, as the title suggests, is it rooted in any clear place marker or geographic referent like Home Counties, Tiger Bay, or Tales From Turnpike House. What it possesses is a mission: to get up and start partying, although what kind of party is another question. Without such anchors, the record can occasionally feel like odds and ends. But once you adjust your expectations and accept that this is merely another record by a group of wonderfully gifted musicians rather than a culminating statement, it becomes a breeze of a listen.
Despite initially being lumped in with Britpop, Saint Etienne only ever had a passing resemblance to Blur and couldn’t be more different from Oasis. So it’s a thrill that lead single “Glad” leaves their mark so wonderfully on the arena-sized sound, using massive, flickering synths and heroic Bowie guitars to send Cracknell’s love of life’s simple pleasures into the stratosphere. “Brand New Me” also revels in the sunshine but with the bitter relief of a freshly divorced Nicole Kidman. Cracknell is such a reliably warm and compassionate presence as a singer that you sometimes forget how deliciously bitchy she can get when it’s time to twist the knife. The interplay between her poisonous kiss-off and the chirpy enthusiasm of Confidence Man’s Janet Planet is wonderfully sweet and sour. “Darling, darling, mon amour/I never said my heart was pure,” Cracknell deadpans in a mock-seductive purr before delivering the killing blow: “Maybe time’s the cure.”
Saint Etienne are one of the ultimate record-collecting bands, but International makes clear that they haven’t added many new releases to their stash in a while. The band’s willingness to wear its loves and influences on its sleeve has long been one of its greatest qualities, but there are a number of instances where their interpretations run a little too literal. The primary-color flash and strut of Vince Clarke and the Human League are written all over “He’s Gone” and “Save It for a Rainy Day,” while “Take Me to the Pilot” replicates the massive build and crush of an Orbital track with an assist from the Hartnolls themselves. While these are perfectly serviceable songs, they feel like exercises rather than experiments, achieving expected results rather than spontaneous ones. A final album also invites comparison to all the others that came before it, and International hardly bests Saint Etienne’s remarkable back catalog. Want a better riff on Orbital? See “Burnt Out Car.” The moonstruck disco of “Dancing Heart?” It’s a dead ringer for “Stars Above Us.” Even the winsome, brunch-time duet “The Go Betweens,” featuring Nick Heyward, feels like the middle point between “Mario’s Cafe” and the group’s candy-cane club classic “I Was Born on Christmas Day.”
What’s striking about the record is that although there are still moments when the band makes a bid for freedom or whimsy or rapture, Saint Etienne often approach their songs as spectators looking in from the outside. “Two Lovers” and “He’s Gone” are both narrated from the sidelines of failing relationships, while album (and career) closer “The Last Time” ends on the unbelievably depressing image of pop lifers-turned-responsible adults scrolling through their friend’s holiday pictures on Facebook until the day they die. This staidness and concern for the well-being of other people is incredibly mature, but maturity settles us in our ways and knocks the fantastic out of our sails. You get the sense that the trio is too sensible about heartache to truly capture it anymore. I’d have been much more curious to know what they’d make of loss and eternity, the mysteries at the far other side of youth and experience.
Listening to International feels bittersweet. As any fan can attest, there’s a distinct ache that comes when your own sense of a music’s endlessness is bookended by the fact that there will unavoidably be a “last time.” Playing it again, I was reminded of all the other remarkable musicians today who, in their beauty, craft, and eclecticism, carry the torch for Saint Etienne. Confidence Man, certainly, but also Smerz, Jockstrap, Magdalena Bay, Nourished by Time, PinkPantheress—hell, even Addison Rae. Saint Etienne’s entire career is a testament to the idea that music is a refuge from loss, but they also prove that old records ripen the ground and seed the future for new music. As dearly as they’ll be missed, there’s no point in truly saying goodbye to Bob, Pete, and Sarah. I’ll see them again on the dancefloor.
