Listening to early Saint Etienne records must be dominated by the promise of youth: the sound of three wide-eyed arrivals in the big city making the most of their pop dreams. The joy of Bob Stanley and Pete Wiggs' production comes from its refusal to simply escape, forging a clever, oblique path where slice-of-life charm runs alongside outrageous pop fantasy. Antiquated or half-imagined zones such as Finisterre, Tiger Bay and Foxbase Alpha were mapped onto the real texture of the Home Counties, West Country and London itself. Sarah Cracknell harnesses the easy intimacy of her voice to navigate the highs and lows of this sometimes live, sometimes cardboard set, her bright, comforting presence leading to Wiggs and Stanley's fireworks.
But time has an inexorable telescoping way, and you could almost weep for the band's optimism about the era and the lost world that inspired it: London still welcoming and accessible, the UK still part of Europe, flights of ecstasy and Concorde and Englishness as sources of breezy pride rather than vein-bursting reaction. “When you're 20 or 21,” Cracknell says in an unmistakable voice on the opening track of the group's 11th studio album, The Night“You have so much energy and faith.” One could read the song's title, “Settle In,” in two ways: like a rainy night at home, or like waiting out the rest of your life. On The NightSaint Etienne temper their boundless imaginations with a sense of perfection and adult knowledge, keeping the fire burning with full awareness of the cold and dark that is fast approaching.
The Night it feels like an extension and refinement of 2021's incredible melancholy I'm trying to tell you. This record, which weaved sleepy dub production and elliptical samples into mournful circles, relied on repetition without ever fully articulating the obvious sadness at its center. On the contrary, The NightHis turn to atmospheric music is combined with a profound world-weariness. Stanley and Wiggs conjure up nighttime scenes with one ear for chilling resonance, projecting the creaks, aches and eerie frequencies not heard during the day. Their palette is both detailed and impressionistic, creating a dense fog and suffusing it with spots that flicker and recede with the music. On “Through the Glass” and “Northern Counties East”, the band soundtracks endless rainfall, which completes the dark situation with percussion, aching harpsichord and subdued guitar. Sometimes the darkness is so thick, you'd be forgiven for thinking you'd put on The Caretaker or a latter-day Burial record.
