Many great pop songs can be said to have their own personality. Saint Etienne's have their own sense of place. Last June, Swedish dance-pop duo Air France released "GBG Belongs to Us", a three-part multimedia tribute to their hometown of Gothenburg. The Swedes explained their intentions in words lovingly similar to the ones they'd used to describe Saint Etienne in a Pitchfork interview a few months earlier: "For us, geography and architecture are essential elements of pop."
That goes for Pete Wiggs, Bob Stanley, and Sarah Cracknell. As anybody who recognized the above reference to early Saint Etienne album cut "London Belongs to Me" already knows-- and many more people are just in time to discover. The UK trio's first two albums, 1991's Foxbase Alpha and 1993's So Tough, were metropolitan through and through, building 1990s ambient-house modernism onto a foundation of 1960s Swinging London mod. Add the slightly twee romanticism of record-collecting indie kids, and the results transported listeners someplace new and fantastical. (Full disclosure: Stanley, a music journalist, has contributed to Pitchfork.)
Faster than you could say "Live Forever", though, there went the neighborhood. As if those first two albums weren't far enough out of step with the prevailing trend toward grunge, then along came Britpop, which picked up Saint Etienne's Anglophilia only to mire it, with a few happy exceptions, in retro guitars and lad culture. The group kept on moving-- and just as well, too. Tiger Bay was where they successfully confronted that Difficult Third Album by taking the M4 through the British countryside. Finisterre was where, after a record or two in the (relative) wilderness, they revisited their old London and once again made it new. Both, as the latest in an ongoing series of 2xCD reissues from this influential but still underappreciated band, have plenty to offer, to longtime [#script:http://pitchfork.com/media/backend/js/tiny_mce/themes/advanced/langs/en.js]|||||| followers and curious newcomers alike.
Tiger Bay is sort of Saint Etienne's best album. I say "sort of," because it depends who you ask, but also because it depends which version you ask them about. There are different track listings and different covers and everything. This deluxe edition stays truest to the original UK release, which is a bit odd, seeing as in the liner notes Stanley is quoted as saying that Tiger Bay "needed a couple more punchy pop songs." The 1996 German reissue, an editorial favorite around here, includes probably the group's punchiest pop song: Eurodance smash "He's on the Phone", which isn't on either disc of this volume.
No matter. Originally released in 1994, Tiger Bay still makes for the subtlest, most cinematic, and pretty much indisputably last of Saint Etienne's astounding initial burst of albums. The record's blend of pastoral folk and silvery electronics was worlds apart from Union Jack-waving contemporaries' phony Beatlemania. More recent atmospheric-folk records like Goldfrapp's Seventh Tree haven't quite been able to get there, either.
The geographical Tiger Bay bustled as a 19th-century Welsh port, gave its name to a 1950s Hayley Mills slice-of-life film, and has since been rebranded as Cardiff Bay, a contemporary leisure and entertainment district. Saint Etienne's Tiger Bay can evoke all three locations at once. Just see "Like a Motorway": It borrows the melody of traditional song "Silver Dagger", coolly recounts a suburban melodrama, and runs on pulsating synths befitting Giorgio Moroder. It never breaks for a chorus.
The rest of the album brilliantly explores this crossroads between pre-modern, modern, and ultramodern. Underworld's Rick Smith, who mixed and engineered "Like a Motorway", also lends a futuristic sheen to instrumental opener "Urban Clearway" and wordlessly urgent harmonica trip "Cool Kids of Death". For orchestral folk, there's acoustic ballad "Former Lover". Sometimes Tiger Bay wants too much, like dub meeting traditional song on "Western Wind / Tankerville", or Massive Attack's Shara Nelson howling into a gale on the downtempo "On the Shore". The poppier moments hold up best: the flamenco-Eurodance weirdness of "Pale Movie", the Bacharach-house swoon of "Hug My Soul", the unadorned yearning of "Marble Lions".
Eight years later, Finisterre was a return to urbane form for Saint Etienne. After a pair of albums that were, by their standards, underwhelming-- comparatively old-fashioned 1998 Sub Pop debut Good Humor (no "u"), recorded in Sweden, and sprawling 2000 Sean O'Hagan/To Rococo Rot collaboration Sound of Water, recorded in Berlin-- the group jetted back to London. The city was in transition, and so were they. The clever spoken-word samples they'd used until Tiger Bay were here again, and the stylish dance-pop was, too, only with a crucial difference.
No longer the café-hopping naïfs of the early years, these were suburban adults reclaiming the city nightlife. That's more or less the subject of surging acoustic-house opener "Action". Sometimes they mature gracefully, as on the easy-listening "Stop and Think It Over", but not always: Would you check out the electro muscle on critic-baiting "Amateur"? Other times they remember not to grow up at all, whether with galloping vocoder flirtation "New Thing" or the gorgeously textured stomp of "Shower Scene". Slinky, self-referential "B92" continues to impress even after Annie's "Heartbeat" and Little Boots' "Stuck on Repeat" have helped take this idea to fluxpop extremes. Wildflower's cutesy rap on "Soft Like Me" still isn't fashionable, but the song's title is an invitation; those who accept it won't mind.
Elsewhere, the bonus tracks are the expected hodgepodge. On Tiger Bay's second disc, German-edition tracks "Hate Your Drug" and "I Buy American Records" are welcome, as are the Christmas songs-- add them to your holiday playlists now, before you forget-- while the previously unreleased demos, though historically interesting, are no match for the album versions. Finisterre has its hidden gems, too, such as "Soft Like Me"-like instrumental "Primrose Hill" or the laidback pop of "Anderson Unbound". But it's mostly curios: an electro banger for a canceled "Dr. Who" compilation, a Serge Gainsbourg genre exercise, and pretty decent Lee Hazlewood and Beach Boys covers. The low point comes on Tiger Bay extra "Black Horse Latitude", when Cracknell wonders, "Is Michael Jackson's Dangerous as 'bad' as people say?"
For people who own the original records, the best reason to shell out some cash this time around is probably the film counterpart to Finisterre, which comes on a DVD with limited-edition versions of its namesake album. The arty cinematography can make for slow viewing, but the movie provides an enjoyable glimpse of a wonderfully intimate London, including music from the two discs and interviews with the likes of Vashti Bunyan. Also worth owning are the informative Q&As in the liner notes, although it's a shame that Cracknell and Wiggs' comments couldn't be included for Tiger Bay-- victims of a hard drive crash, apparently. Harrumph.
Where were we? Oh yeah. So Tiger Bay became Cardiff Bay, and Finisterre is now Fitzroy. "Tear it down and start again," Cracknell sings on Finisterre's title track. On the same song, Cosmetique's Sarah Churchill declares, "I believe in Donovan over Dylan, love over cynicism." These two albums are landmarks in the career of a band who turned that belief into great pop; in 2010, they sound less like museum pieces than a living, breathing part of the musical environment. This place belongs to us.
