***ALBUM OF THE MONTH | September 2021***
Saint Etienne
I’ve Been Trying To Tell You
Heavenly
Interview | Listen Below
“Remembrance of things past is not necessarily the remembrance of things as they were,” Marcel Proust surmised in his expansive, ambitiously conceived early 20th century novel In Search of Lost Time. Indeed, our minds do tend to play manipulative tricks on us when we recall events of the past, don’t they?
Call it the trappings of sentimental nostalgia or perhaps our proclivity toward revisionist history, but it seems that our imperfect brains are programmed to never truly remember how episodes precisely played out at the time that they materialized. Instead, we tend to dwell upon the more extreme ends of the good-bad spectrum of memory when conjuring these visions in retrospect, enabling our hearts to play a larger role in shaping our recollections.
The thematic foundation of Saint Etienne’s tenth studio album I’ve Been Trying To Tell You is centered on this very notion of memory as a fickle, fragile beast. “Really what I was thinking about with memory failure on the record was more that you obliterate the bad bits and remember the good ones,” the group’s co-founder Bob Stanley explains in our recent interview. “It’s kind of a survival tactic, which I’m pretty sure everyone’s been doing the last eighteen months.”
In typical fashion for the band that possesses a keen appreciation and passion for the multimedia dimensions of the music they make, they’ve partnered with the accomplished photographer/director and self-proclaimed Saint Etienne champion Alasdair McLellan to create a companion short film of the same name. Premiered last week at NFT1 on London’s Southbank, the slow-motion film endearingly reflects the album’s eight songs through a cohesive series of stunning visuals that capture a group of pretty young things indulging in their halcyon days, punctuated by stirring scenes of various landscapes and sites throughout the UK.
As with their previous silver-screen endeavors that include Finisterre (2003), What Have You Done Today Mervyn Day? (2005), This Is Tomorrow (2007), and How We Used to Live (2014), McLellan’s majestic film enhances and illuminates the experience of listening to the album. Or rather, to summon the spirit of the late David Bowie, I’ve Been Trying To Tell You embodies the power of sound and vision working symbiotically to provide an unequivocally beautiful work of art.
“My starting point was an interpretation of my memories from the time I first started to listen to Saint Etienne’s music,” McLellan explains in an official statement. “Of course, it is an interpretation of what I was doing then while looking back at it now. At that time, I was a bored teenager in a village near Doncaster, South Yorkshire; it was a place where very little happened. I now look back at that time as something quite idyllic—even the boredom seems idyllic—and a big part of its soundtrack was Saint Etienne.”
Saint Etienne are no strangers to embedding wistful contemplation of times past within their songs, dating all the way back to the 1990 release of their debut single and reimagination of Neil Young’s “Only Love Can Break Your Heart” with the opening refrain of “When you were young and on your own / How did it feel to be alone.” Ten years later, Sarah Cracknell concluded “How We Used To Live”—the lead single from their 2000 LP Sound of Water—by inquiring, “Do you remember how we used to live?”
Released four years ago, Home Counties—Albumism’s #1 album of the year in 2017—revisits this recurring thread of reminiscence through various references heard on the likes of “Out Of My Mind” (“The memories shake my day / I guess they're here to stay”) and “Magpie Eyes” (“And where did those months go? / When you let your hair grow / The girlfriend I'll never know / Fall in love with scrawl on your hand / Some herbert who plays in a band.”)
With I’ve Been Trying To Tell You, Cracknell, Stanley and Pete Wiggs—who recorded the album remotely for the first time in their career together—have devised an arrestingly atmospheric and evocative work that recalls turn-of-the-century cultural and musical memories from the late 1990s and early 2000s. Commencing with the Tony Blair spearheaded Labour Party’s triumph in the UK’s 1997 general election and concluding with the unconscionable tragedies of September 11, 2001, all taking place prior to the subsequent global proliferation of social media as our primary source of communication and information, it was arguably a more innocent epoch in recent history, even if naively so.
Musically, the eight-song album contains subtle references to the music of the era, by way of a handful of exquisitely embedded samples from the likes of Tasmin Archer, Natalie Imbruglia and the Lightning Seeds, among other pop and post-Britpop staples of the period. Coupled with the enveloping, multi-textured production work by Wiggs and collaborator Gus Bousfield, along with the sparse lyrical content delivered via Cracknell’s ever-reassuring vocals, the sampled fare contributes to the immersive, daydream-inducing feel of the album from beginning to end. “We’ve really pulled apart and dived deep into the samples,” Wiggs confides in an official statement. “The concept and each of our interpretations of it have made this a very special sounding album.”
Purveyors of pop classicism and perennially passionate fans (and expert creators) of pop music in all of its many kaleidoscopic forms, the group bravely embrace something of a creative pivot with the predominantly instrumental I’ve Been Trying To Tell You. Incorporating darker and denser downtempo soundscapes throughout, the album is wholly devoid of the uptempo, dancefloor-friendly arrangements they are arguably most beloved for. “Obviously, it wasn't as commercial as writing a three-minute pop song,” Stanley concedes. “This didn’t feel like we were really doing anything remotely like what we’d done before, so it’s quite surprising when people go ‘I’m glad you’ve gotten back to your old sound!’ It’s, like, ‘huh?’”
While the arrangements here are subdued and ruminative, they are undeniably affecting, leaving enduring imprints in your mind, further intensified if you have the pleasure of viewing the accompanying film as well. With its imposing and impressive percussion, the album’s standout “Fonteyn”—which provides the soundtrack to a hedonistic outdoor dance session in the film—is airy yet haunting, shapeshifting into a shimmering stunner of a song around its halfway mark, accentuated by its lifting of Lighthouse Family’s “Raincloud.”
A languid yet spacious arrangement perfectly aligned with the pacing of the accompanying film visuals, lead offering “Pond House” is a lush, multi-layered gem that features Imbruglia’s looped vocals from the opening lines of her 2002 single “Beauty On The Fire” (“Here it comes again / Cannot outrun my desire”).
Lightning Seeds sampling second single “Penlop” is also an unequivocal highlight, with its slow-building groove interspersed with Cracknell’s hypnotic “la-la-la-la-la” mantra throughout. Just past the four-minute mark, the song gains full-fledged steam with a cacophony of discordant yet enthralling sounds. “Sarah's vocal makes me think of a travel guide, walking you around your half-remembered memories of the late nineties,” Stanley says. “Pete's production on this is wonderful, I like the way it bursts wide open at the end, like someone breaking through from the past into the present day.”
Notable for its harpsichord-indebted resurrection of the ephemeral R&B/pop group Honeyz’ 1999 top 10 UK single “Love Of A Lifetime,” album opener “Music Again” unfolds as a dynamic dirge replete with prominent drum track slaps throughout. Other memorable moments surface in the ambient “Blue Kite,” the sweetly redolent “Little K,” the guitar-drenched “I Remember It Well” and the gorgeous, Tasmin Archer sampling album closer “Broad River,” a heavy track that nevertheless exudes warmth and invites reflection.
A large part of music’s undeniable power and permanence is to remind us, the listeners, of where we were, who we were and what we were feeling when we embraced the songs and albums we cherish. And while we may be prone to subconsciously reconstructing these memories by reminiscing with rose-colored glasses, if this offers comfort to us in an increasingly discomforting world, then so be it.
Time and time again, Saint Etienne have affirmed their penchant for crafting songs and visuals that stimulate the heart, mind and soul, and I’ve Been Trying To Tell You holds true to their well-established blueprint.
Tonight, I will surrender to the sound.
Notable Tracks: “Broad River” | “Fonteyn” | “Penlop” | “Pond House”
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