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Flirting with blasphemy, the two-boys-and-a-girl Britpop group actually traces the spiritual continuum running through consumer culture. Based on the plastic-mold repetition of the phrase "New Thing," the track makes the giggly connection between romantic flings and consumption. Spritely sexy singer Sarah Cracknell coos: "New Thing / It's such a new thing / You've got me where you want me / You've got me where you want me / Oooh yeah. . ." The repeated refrain seems, at first, merely to reflect consumerism: the way that advertising bludgeons and molds consumers. Cracknell ends the refrain with the vocalization: "Oooh yeah." Buried within that pop expression is a longing deeper than that for the "new thing." The command of pop forms to express individuality is Saint Etienne's answer to official ("Our Father who art. . .") definitions. (Cracknell later defies rock-cult common sense: "I believe in Donovan over Dylan.") It signifies the search for truth amidst an ever-changing culture. There's no doubting the sincere, uncontainable, ache behind Cracknell's singing in the song's second refrain: "Could it be we'll stay together? / Will I ever know? / If this night could last forever / Maybe then I'll know." It's an incredible high - an affirmation - to hear so succinctly articulated the desire for eternity and for knowledge despite a culture of the fleeting, the one-nighters. Cracknell's plaintive refrain gets synthesized - another kind of vocalization that fulfills Saint Etienne's information-age metaphysics. A computer declares Cracknell's basic human dreams. Words - meaning - are formed through the listener's imaginative participation with the music. The audience shares Cracknell's hopes with every dance response - an allegiance that connects both artist and audience to the elusive eternal. That perspective is defined by songwriters Bob Stanley and Pete Wiggs in "Amateur": "Get a Corinthian view!" It conflates pop marketing (Corinthian leather), the album's architectural metaphor (Corinthian order), and the pop group's dissemination of spiritual ideas (St. Paul's Corinthian letters). This on-high view of contemporary culture is Olympian and dizzying in its complexity. That also describes the group's polyrhythmic sound. It grooves and it moves - finding faith in fun and vice-versa. Through lead vocalist Cracknell, Stanley and Wiggs topple cultural power structures. On the hiphop track "Soft Like Me," Saint Etienne eradicates Eminem's 8 Mile lie with an effervescent liberation from gender-based socialization: "Baby, I'll encourage you to be expressive not aggressive" and "If I never got no hugs when I fell down in the play-ground / Maybe it would be different now."
It's also pop politics. Saint Etienne spells it out in "B92": "This is our wall of sound / Hate and fear are taking over this city / But they'll never get through when the records are sounding so pretty." The song's beautiful noise - channeled from the ether - recognizes Phil Spector, disco, hiphop, Gary Numan, and techno as modes available to express perseverance in the now and the always. On the exquisite "Stop and Think It Over," Stanley and Wiggs indulge Cracknell's - our - doo-wop romantic confusion ("Could he be a lover? / Could he be a friend?"). Saint Etienne looks to The Supremes and pop history for clarity - simultaneously cross-referencing gay camp culture. The elongated techno soundscape of "The Way We Live Now" introduces Cracknell's declaration: "This time I'm gonna say / What's been building up for days." Saint Etienne is, rightly, in awe of emotional expression in all its forms, meeting new requirements. "Have you ever been to a harvester before?" asks the narrator, kicking off the album's first track: "Action." The narrator's question poses communal ritual as the potential location for disseminating - ala the band's namesake - emotional Revelations. Cracknell's " Saturday-night/Sunday-morning call: "I've been searching for / All the people I used to talk to / And all the people who knew the answers / Let's get the feeling again." On "Summerisle", Saint Etienne meditates on baptism as a return to roots: "Return to the river again / To live by the water again." Meanwhile, the disco beats of "Shower Scene" provide fluid contexts for the listener/dancer to "Call my name" - declaring the singer's identity and lovability. Also, the title track begins with a memory - "I loved to draw the world when I was a little girl." Then, the beats multiply - "It helped me see the world as I wanted it to be." The dance beats underscore the freedom of Saint Etiennes' "perfect-city" dream. Saint Etienne's concentration on the essence of culture and identity (roots, love, childhood) ironically - perfectly - leads up to "my message, really": "Finisterre / To tear it down and start again / Think about the Love / Inside." The complexity of Saint Etienne's art fulfills its blessed simplicity. As Cracknell intones: "Feelings start to grow / The more you know." Saint Etienne's 2002 album, Finisterre, engages new feelings - or old ones in new ways. It's not just another "new thing." |
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Don't miss how the best original song of the year - "New Thing" - begins.
"Our Father who art in Heaven, please stay there." So announces the
official-sounding male voice that intros and/or closes the tracks on Saint
Etienne's delicious and delicate edifice: Finisterre. To mistake the "New
Thing" intro for flippancy misunderstands the degree of Saint Etienne's
seriousness.
Saint Etienne