Times were when the term "concept album" meant having to phone in sick to wade through some four hour long metaphysical prospectus on flying Nepalese goatherds performed by men in long capes. But not anymore. The storyboard to Saint Etienne's Tales From Turnpike House - in nature sharing many of the proletarian grievances of The Streets' A Grand Don't Come For Free and Blur's Modern Life Is Rubbish - is set in and around an Islington high rise and its charmlessly franchised local watering hole "The Hat And Fan" public house; a dysfunctional Camberwick Green environment populated by drifters, dreamers and misfits, where the circadian essentials of the neighbourhood bakery have been supplanted by the pretensions of tanning salons and where the alleyways (the sweet easy listening of "Side Streets") afford pleasant strolls for those unphased by the prospect of having one's wallet emptied and face rearranged. While film director Mike Leigh's bleak burlesques and the astringency of Luke Haines' Black Box Recorder provide honourable comparisons, Saint Etienne remain in love with wit, optimism, The Beach Boys and cut-price electronic disco. Thus, the eastern Eurovision witchery of "Lightning Strikes Twice" and the rooftop party funk-lite of "Stars Above Us" provide valuable pop hit currency, necessary checks and balances to the suffocating social fragmentation narrated on the outstanding "Teenage Winter". Even David Essex - it's official, he's cool again - pops up playing Richard Briers to Sarah Cracknell's Felicity Kendall on the rat race opt-out "Relocate". Tales From Turnpike House is just the sort of record to give concept albums a good name. --Kevin Maidment
Review by Andy Kellman
No matter the associates or variables involved, a Saint Etienne album is always going to end up sounding just like a Saint Etienne album, even if it's a little different from what came before it. On Tales from Turnpike House, the group gets two productions from Xenomania (Girls Aloud, Sugababes), several vocal arrangements from Tony Rivers (the Castaways, Harmony Grass) and son, some songwriting and vocal contributions from the misunderstood David Essex ("Rock On," "Stardust"), and assorted things from faces old and new. The album comes out as their most organic since 1998's Good Humor; even the tracks driven by programming are warm in comparison to vast chunks of both Sound of Water and Finisterre. The concept -- a day in the life of fictional characters who live in a house that does indeed exist -- allows for a range of material that's as broad as what can be heard on any other Saint Etienne album. The glitzy dance-pop of "Stars Above Us" ("Stars above us, cars below us/Nothing can touch us, baby"), for example, precedes the ruminative "Teenage Winter," containing an all-too-sharp expression of the resisted shift away from adolescent fanaticism ("And in the charity shop...not much left on the doorstep recently/Something to do with eBay, Johnny reckons/He's bidding on it now, for a Subbuteo catalog '81-'82/He'll win it, put it in a drawer and forget he ever bought it"). Though the other dancefloor-ready songs -- the sleek, silken "A Good Thing" and the sweetly lacerating "Lightning Strikes Twice" -- have major presence, the gentler moments, thriving on easy-to-miss intricacies and enlivening vocal arrangements (the Rivers men are astute Beach Boys disciples), are especially generous with their charms. [The U.S. version, released on Savoy Jazz (this is not a joke), has a substantially different sequence and three tracks not present on the original U.K. issue. The best of the three is the B-side "I'm Falling," a David Essex collaboration that is gorgeously melancholy and not far off from an atmospheric version of Places to Visit's "We're in the City." Unfortunately, it does not contain Essex' vocal contribution, "Relocate." It's understandable that the label would want to add tracks to the album to differentiate it from a version that had been released months prior, but the resequencing and swapping out of tracks is a real head-scratcher.]
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