St. Etienne remain one of the most intelligent, pop literate acts around. Their previous album, 1998's Good Humour, found them breaking with their own conventions by dropping samples and effects in favour of real musicians. However, Sound Of Water sees them blending the two with immaculate good taste: strings and woodwind (arrangements by the High Llamas' Sean O'Hagan) sit alongside bubbling keyboards and quietly throbbing beats while guitars (courtesy of Doves' Jez Williams) rub up against buzzing synths. German electronic pioneers To Rococo Rot chip in with some minimalist, arty arrangements but only in the context of some beautifully sculpted songs. And what songs: "Sycamore", "Don't Back Down", "Downey CA" all swell with the sort of lush, gossamer melodies that breeze through your consciousness like a warm breeze through a curtain. Sarah Cracknell sounds like she's going to expire at any moment, while Wiggs and Stanley breathe life into every musical phrase. --Mike Pattenden
Saint Etienne
Sound of Water
[Sub Pop]
Rating: 7.7
When last we heard from Saint Etienne, on last year's near-miss Places to Visit EP, they were doing their best Oedipa Maas impersonation. There they were, locked in some motel room with Jim O'Rourke, likely wrapped in untold layers of protective clothing, and engaged in elaborate tricks to avoid actually giving anything up. That release, while occasionally enjoyable, was hobbled by its unwillingness to make good on any of its promises.
Thankfully, Sound of Water manages to pull off exactly what Places to Visit hinted at. The album follows the EP's trajectory by marrying Saint Etienne's signature pop smoothness with a slightly more avant-garde spirit. But where its predecessor was thin, rough and square Sound of Water is entirely the opposite. It's a fully realized implementation of Places to Visit's frustrating, if enticing, unfinished experiment.
Don't go getting crazy ideas in your head, though. We're talking about Saint Etienne here, not Nurse with Wound. There are no 15-minute stretches of eldritch rattling noises here. When I say "avant-garde spirit," what I really mean is "glossy avant-garde sheen." This isn't to say that their version of experimentalism is false, hollow or cautious, but they're not going to forget what they're all about. Which, as we all know, is style.
The end result is an album filled with great pop songs that have been augmented with some fairly non-standard beeps, clunks and whirs. The album is cohesive enough to allow that conceit, and none of those non-standard noises sound forced or tacked on. The songs flow effortlessly along, and even the instrumental tracks are fully developed-- none suffer from the half-finished feel that made Places to Visit so dissatisfying. Much of the credit for this can probably be attributed to the band's collaborators To Rococo Rot and Sean O'Hagan who provide squirm-style effects and string arrangements, respectively.
The record's standout moments come with the borderline balladry of "Sycamore," with its naturalistic acoustic guitar and backwards cymbals, the especially beepy-clunky-whirry (but still hooky) "Don't Back Down," and the nine-minute opus "How We Used to Live." Beyond that, the record is generally enjoyable, if still somewhat similar to previous efforts.
As with past Saint Etienne albums, Sound of Water is ear-candy all the way through. Still, they've managed to add a layer of subtlety and novelty beneath the glossiness-- or at least they've managed to coat their stylish exterior with a couple extra-thick layers of varnish. Either way, the result is the same as always: a pretty tasty album, even if its shelf-life may not eternal.
-Zach Hooker
Review by Stephen Thomas Erlewine
Ten years on, Saint Etienne found themselves at a bit of a crossroads. They had long ago stopped having hits in the U.K., settling into a cult audience in both their homeland and the U.S. There isn't an inherent problem with having a cult audience, but cult bands often have the stigma of being on the cutting edge. At the start of their career, Saint Etienne was on the cutting edge. Their first two albums were at the foundation of many '90s pop trends, including the revival of swinging '60s London, the unabashedly melodic bent of Brit-pop, the fascination for forgotten easy-listening artifacts from the '60s, the kaleidoscopic blend of '60s sound and '90s sensibility later heard on Beck records, plus the insurgent twee-pop of the late '90s. For their tenth anniversary, they decided to reclaim the cutting edge with Sound of Water. The album strove to keep the concise, song-oriented focus of Good Humour, while expanding the horizons of their music to focus on abstract, dreamy, electronic sounds. There are moments of pop pleasure here, surrounded by spare, languid electronica sections, vaguely reminiscent of the High Llamas. This is where maturity pays off. Saint Etienne never lingers too long in one area, letting the album flow gracefully between these two extremes and placing some very good pop melodies along the way. There are no knockout singles on par with those from So Tough or Tiger Bay, but Saint Etienne has pretty much given up on the pop charts, preferring to concentrate on cohesive, stronger albums. That may mean that Sound of Water simply isn't as exciting as their earlier work, and it also means that there isn't a good gateway song to the record. But that's OK, since with repeated plays, Sound of Water reveals itself as a first-rate effort.
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