Saint Etienne
Sound of Water
(Sub Pop)
In the liner notes of Saint Etienne's Sub Pop debut Good Humor, author Douglas Coupland
(Generation X, Microserfs) commented that the band's music was trance inducing,
"utterly metropolitan and effortlessly clean." It transported him to a completely different
place from the Pacific Northwest that he calls home. Even though that album was inspired by
being on the road in America, I feel the same. I'm not sure where that place is -- maybe an
unnamed European city from a Kazuo Ishiguro novel or rain-slicked country roads from SE's
native England.
Sound of Water, released last summer, is again a transporting vehicle for the mind. The
pièce de résistance is the nine-minute odyssey "How We Used to Live" that starts with a
sample of a car steaming by and cruises through three distinct "movements" and a chorus that
urges you to "sail away...on and on." Perhaps they've been reading their own liner notes. Opting
for more meandering sonic landscapes than crisp pop tunes, the album has taken a long while to
grow on me and I still think it's a bit too much soundtrack and not enough on track. I'm told
that it's a must-listen with headphones, but that's not how I prefer to experience music. For pure single bliss, Pete Wiggs and Bob Stanley have the formula down cold. Remember the first
sounds heard here a decade ago? The brilliant reconstruction of Neil Young's "Only Love Can
Break Your Heart." And when they combined with chanteuse extraordinaire Sarah Cracknell,
Saint Etienne became untouchable. The new set includes the infectious "Heart Fails (in the back
of a taxi)" and "Boy Is Crying" that take no prisoners. Dance music without drilling your skull
with inane beats; bliss-out tunes that are sap-free. Does this sound like American pop to you? Rating: 7
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