I've been listening to this since Friday. Walking to work on a clear, chill September morning, before the daily walks are both done in darkness and the sadness of winter is upon you, I heard 'sun in my morning' for the first time. I knew the album was going to make me happy. It sets up a groove on triangle with acoustic guitar, organ, and brushed hats joining in. A little gem, as Bobby Robson said of Paul Gascoigne. Without the fat and blubbery tears though keeping all the sentimentality. The next track, the longer more ambitious 'milk bottle symphony' starts telling the lives of the residents of the block of flats, the characters we'll continue to meet over the course of the album. It begins with gentle synth pulses and drum machine - while still managing to feel like a slice of classic sixties pop unsullied by the euphoric plagiarism of the British Invasion - but morphing over its four gorgeous minutes to take in a tubular bell and cello break. I'll be putting this on a CD for my neice as the last character is a girl going to school and she has her name. The next track 'lightning strikes twice' I mention not for its own qualities but to ask the question 'what separates St. Etienne from chart pop?' It's not the instrumentation or even the lead vocals. Chart pop can handle the breathy female lead of St. even if it would tend to go for the obvious high note which they don't. This song has, like many on the album, a bedrock of vocal harmonies that could serve as all the harmonic backdrop the song needs. I imagine that there were instruments on the last song 'goodnight' at one stage and they were removed to leave the big acapella backing that remains. I think what separates their sound is differentiation. From Phil Spector's wall of sound, through ABBA's doubling (and quadrupling) all instruments and vocals to fatten the sound and remove all elements of individual performance, to the contemporary 'hot mix' used for radio play which compresses all the timbres and removes the dynamic elements of a song into a warm comforting soup, there is a tendency in chart pop to not allow elements of a song to stand out. The backing vocals on this album sound like a group of people. They don't sound like the Sugababes - all of whom have the same syrupy soul voice (don't get me wrong, I have a soft spot for the Sugababes) and when harmonies like theirs are swamped in reverb its very difficult to imagine that at some point a human chest pushed out air damp with waste water from the body to make the sound. St. Etienne leave music sounding of itself quite often. The beautiful 'side streets' is a reclaim the streets for the stormtroopers of gentrification. 'Last order for Gary Stead' a glitter band stomper with Petula Clark or Karen Carpenter effortlessly melancholic on top. 'Relocate' sounds like a duet between Anthony Newley and a property greed programme TV presenter in a sixties kitchen sink drama musical. 'Teenage Winter' reminds me of a song on a Siesta compilation I have that was made to celebrate the tastes of a soft pop enthusiast who sadly died a few years ago called 'Emma Peel crossword Puzzle' which was the titles of Avengers episodes read out to music except it also has a chorus.
Now I have to listen to all their records over the last ten years that I missed out on.
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