Like all semi-pop survivors, UK trio Saint Etienne have settled into a warm familiarity. A deep catalog-- one that shows more refinement than reinvention over the past 10 years-- means the band's stuck with its cult. But that's actually got to be a pretty comforting idea in 2009, as any overworked young buzz band approaching onstage breakdown before album two can tell you.
Still: What about when Saint Etienne was new, maybe even a potential commercial prospect? Listen to this new reissue of the band's debut album, 1991's Foxbase Alpha and you'll hear that, then as now, Saint Etienne made lovely, accessible music. But Foxbase is also far closer to capital-P pop than the band's recent refined blend of exuberance and melancholy. So why didn't I hear Saint Etienne songs like Foxbase's "Nothing Can Stop Us" and "Only Love Can Break Your Heart"-- both Billboard #1s on the dance charts-- burbling from communal boomboxes in eighth grade?
One theory for why Saint Et stiffed in the States is also a big part of the band's draw to many fans: The potentially limiting pleasures of Anglophilia. So yes, Foxbase is littered with odd, musty little samples from odd, musty Olde England, and beats from the highly polished dancefloors of contemporary London. In fact, Pitchfork contributor Tom Ewing once wrote a wonderful essay that suggested Foxbase was best understood as a musical embodiment of the whole vibe of late 20th-century UK living, including, but not limited to, the mix of chic, glossy multi-cultural collisions and grubby, hospitably lived-in neighborhoods that made up London itself. (A brief break to get some conflict of interest stuff out of the way: A) The aforementioned Mr. Ewing contributes an essay to the liner notes of the Foxbase reissue, and B) Saint Etienne member Bob Stanley has contributed to Pitchfork. If either of those things stick in your craw while reading the more-or-less gush that follows, well, sorry.)
Another reason Saint Etienne never hit with a U.S. mass audience? While the likes of Snap! and Crystal Waters made big-budget dance records with an urbane sheen, records that would work in any capital city club around the world, Foxbase Alpha's sonics had a DIY edge, an underground-gone-mainstream bulletin from a very specific milieu. Albeit one that can still be enjoyed by anyone not predisposed to hate the soft, the sunny, the lilting, the laid-back, and the mildly twee. Foxbase is on one level a UK indie pop record with a particularly unique sound and vision-- the joys and pangs of cusp-of-adulthood love and loss, delivered with a clued-in-ingenue mix of wide-eyed enthusiasm and knowing languor by Sarah Cracknell, set to a backing stitched from the gentler side of pop history by studio whizzes Bob Stanley and Pete Wiggs. It's just a unique indie pop record that happened to bump to a bright pop pulse.
What's funny about bringing up the always divisive p-word is that I remember some big-name 90s dance producers actually dissing Saint Etienne by calling the band "bubblegum." We can assume those producers meant Saint Etienne erred too much on the indie side, sacrificing dancefloor kick. But much like the Anglophilic fantasy world the band conjures, that split allegiance is another part of Saint Etienne's specific appeal. Foxbase tracks like "Spring" and the cover of Neil Young's "Only Love Can Break Your Heart" do indeed sound like heart-on-sleeve pop kids (in the C86 sense) trying their quite adroit hands at lounge-y hip-house and piano-driven disco.
But several of Foxbase's best tunes move past adding idiosyncratic touches to off-the-rack uptempo 4/4 rhythms, and into something more unique and beguiling. The drowsy, heartsick ballad "Carnt Sleep" sounds like a humid summer spent spinning Sarah Records 7"s back to back with Sade, slick soul secretly slid into an indie-friendly sleeve. Or there's the Cocteau Twins-ian shivers of "London Belongs to Me", with its smitten, multi-tracked Cracknell crooning to herself across a diamond sea of piano chords. Assured but approachable, these club-informed but not quite club-ready songs offered a wholly other kind of "indie dance" from the previous punk-funk generation or the cheap-and-easy preset-punching remixes of the blog-house era, something like careful cursive on pastel paper compared to blurry cut-and-paste photocopies or generic computer typeface."
Foxbase squeezes so many "lighter side of" sounds-- be they from the worlds of rock, dance, soul, whatever-- into one LP that it's a marvel it sounds so unified, mostly owing to Wiggs and Stanley fixing on the platonic house rhythm as the glue to hold their disparate passions together. But the second disc of bonus tracks often feels like two producers still figuring out how to make the raw materials of post-acid house their own. A grab-bag of late 80s/early 90s rave sonics-- only sometimes processed through what we know as the Saint Etienne idiom-- dates much of the material. "Chase HQ" and "Speedwell" are competent but sketchy early UK house singles, full of jittery samples and keyboard stabs. Fun, but ultimately too generic without Cracknell's voice or the sample-choice oddness and studio chops Wiggs and Stanley would bring to the band's later music. Better is the dub playground chant of "Sally Space", Cracknell humming "Iko Iko" through a quiet storm front of classic ambient house textures, the Orb with a dose of girl-pop glee.
Speaking of the p-word (again): Continental, a previously Japan-only odds-and-ends collection reissued in the same batch of Saint Et records as this new Foxbase, works as a sort of mirror image of Too Young to Die, the band's almost absurdly listenable 1995 singles compilation. If the all-hits uniformity of TYTD represents Saint Etienne's final, most obvious stab at Now That's What I Call Pop immortality, then Continental is the beginning of the more wide-ranging (and hit-or-miss) restlessness that's characterized the band's records from 1998's Good Humor onward. Each track is recognizably Saint Etienne-- Cracknell's inimitable winsome-but-grown-and-sexy coo announces that, if nothing else-- but the tracks (frequently darker, often instrumental) go very different places than the uniform, bubbly house-lite of Foxbase's uptempo moments.
So much so that when legit UK hit "He's on the Phone"-- not coincidentally the only track Continental shares with Too Young to Die-- shimmers into earshot, it's such a glittering throwback to the old Saint Etienne that it nearly skews the vibe of the whole collection. "He's on the Phone" is Saint Et's most deliriously normal single, a go-for-broke attempt at the kind of high-test mainstream house that still appears on comps with "Ibiza" unironically in their titles. The rest of Continental offers another of Saint Etienne's seemingly paradoxical combos. It's far more subdued, even reflective, than Foxbase's unashamedly hooks-first buoyancy. But it's also sonically "big" in a way that makes it seem like a commentary on the mid-90s moment when even chill-out-centric electronic music went stadium-sized.
"Burnt Out Car" and "Stormtrooper in Drag" have, respectively, the kind of thick and fluffy prog-house keyboards and crashing drums you could imagine Underworld or Orbital using to whip a festival audience into a frenzy, a far cry from the "made in your friend's flat" scale of Foxbase. The effect of this surface-level bigness in Saint Et's hands is decidedly different, though, than in those their Glastonbury-headling contemporaries. It's the sound of the band's blithe young lovers suddenly forced to grow up as money and traditional notions of glamor infiltrate their imagined world. Even as they age, though, and club-life-as-permanent-playground gives way to club-life-as-vector-for-adult-pain, Saint Etienne's cast of characters retain an unrepentant sentimental streak, one not so much obliterated by experience as deepened by it. "Groveley Road" and "Suburban Autumn Lieutenant" exude a vibe of poignant longing that's hammy as hell-- it takes guts to include an image as blatant as "the season has changed" in a song about the dissipation of love-- but also wholly convincing if you go with it.
While listening to these reissues during an oppressively gloomy, rain-sodden East Coast springtime, I also re-read Martin Amis' London Fields, a vision of the city as the second millennium drew to a close that's almost Foxbase's inverse: A world of venal yuppies, reprehensible con-men, and lost souls who've long since given up on love. Saint Etienne's heart-on-sleeve protagonists (and audience) were too earnest to conceivably survive a day in such an overwhelmingly beaten-down environment. The sort of "decaying violent reality of the harsh urban etcetera" that Mr. Ewing's essay suggests Saint Et caught shit for "ignoring."
Equally fantastical, Amis' all-ugly-all-the-time London is also Anglophilic catnip, just the kind that tends to impress the sort of American who prefers sardonic "we're all fucked" loathing to idealism or nostalgia. Grossly sentimental as it may sound, though, at the moment I'll take Foxbase's imaginary year-round summer, where it's "too warm to even hold hands" but the rush and flush of first-love makes it too tempting to resist. There's enough doom-mongering waiting for me when I open the BBC News website every morning to not enjoy a little escapism.
