Saint Etienne
The Night
Heavenly
Listen Below
Much to my primary care physician’s chagrin, I am a sleep-deficient night owl, prone to staying up past midnight, despite my typical 5:30am wakeup call. During the week, my daytime hours are a whirlwind, jam-packed with the incessant demands of a deadline-driven corporate day job coupled with parenting two pre-teen daughters who also demand (and deserve) substantial portions of my attention. It’s a lot to manage, and for better or worse, I often become robotic in the auto-pilot fulfillment of my daily tasks, so as not to dwell upon the mundanity that defines much of my days.
So each night around 10pm, when the house is quiet and my wife, daughters and pets have retired for the evening, I stay up. Primarily, I use these final hours of the day to work on editing Albumism content with a glass or two of wine within arm’s reach. But I also revel in this time to be alone, removed from the chaos of the day that’s just passed, left to my own introspective devices propelled by the lucidity of thought that eluded me earlier in the day.
Hence why the nocturnal ruminations and ambient arrangements that define Saint Etienne’s new album The Night resonate so profoundly for me. Thematically, the songs largely revolve around the dichotomy between the wide-eyed hopefulness of youth and the resignation—and reality—of the aging process, all of which connects with those of us currently entrenched in our middle-aged years. “When you're twenty or twenty one / You have so much belief,” Sarah Cracknell contemplates in the album-opening soliloquy “Settle In.” You have so much energy and belief / Will it be gold? / Tell me my fortune / Time flies / It slips and slides / All roads lead to here.”
Co-produced by the group and composer-producer Augustin Bousfield, the follow-up to their 2021 LP I’ve Been Trying To Tell You unfurls as a soothing, cathartic balm in its hushed tones and meditative musings, all by design. “We wanted The Night to be a calming album, warm and serene,” Bob Stanley explains in an official statement. “But at the same time we wanted to create something gorgeous and dense.”
Indeed, a beautiful incandescence pervades the album, beginning with the multi-layered lead single “Half Light,” in which Cracknell evokes dusk, conjuring the transition from light to dark. “Nightingale” is similarly striking in its subdued elegance and dramatic piano flourishes, as it captures the spirit of solitude that resurfaces throughout the album (“And the nightingale / Sings a lonely tale / Yes, the nightingale / Has a lonely tale”).
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The solace that can be summoned in being alone while most of the world around you sleeps reemerges later in the album on “Wonderlight,” with Cracknell’s plaintive spoken word painting a vivid portrait for the listener (“The feeling of walking home / On your own / Late at night / Coming back from the pub / Something in the streetlights / The glow / The orange glow in the rain / And then you're home / And you put some tunes on / And you fall asleep / The windows are misting / And the records are playing / It's dark”).
The inevitability of time’s passage and our natural inclination to reflect upon the past surfaces at key points throughout The Night, beginning with the melancholic “When You Were Young,” with Cracknell reminiscing, “When you were young / Times we had, things you said / Times we had, things you said / They're all still in my head.” The wistful, piano-driven “Gold” references the desire to “conquer time,” which can be interpreted from the perspective of either someone who is young and attempting to envisage the wider future that lies ahead or someone in their later years grasping to reconcile what the latter stages of their life portend.
“Preflyte” is an earnest yet sobering empty-nest account of a mother setting her child free into the world of adulthood, tinged by the knowledge of experience, as Cracknell muses, “All the places that you’ll go / And the people that you'll know / The hearts you're gonna break / And the friends you’re gonna make / It's hard to let you go / But I knew it would be so / Fly away”).
Shimmering Rhodes-blessed keys, plaintive guitar strums and solemn horns coalesce in dreamlike fashion on the sublime “Alone Together,” which concludes the record, with Cracknell revisiting her earlier mantra “Time flies / It slips and slides” against the backdrop of gentle, restorative raindrops.
“It’s the kind of record I like to listen to in the dark or with my eyes closed,” the band’s Pete Wiggs confides in The Night’s accompanying press release, with Stanley adding, “it's definitely a headphone album.” Consistent with its thematic focus and title, The Night is best experienced alone, devoid of distraction, late at night. Thoughtfully conceived and elegantly executed, it’s a rather welcome addition to Saint Etienne’s increasingly kaleidoscopic recorded repertoire, which continues to inspire in its breadth and depth of sounds, three-and-a-half decades into the group’s ever-dynamic career.
Notable Tracks: “Half Light” | “Nightingale” | “Preflyte” | “Alone Together”
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