For an amazingly long time, Saint Etienne have deftly blended and updated the cool bits of past forms with the sounds of now. Sarah Cracknell, Bob Stanley, and Pete Wiggs have made music that's danceable, joyous, peppy, and sometimes mournful. Now, in 2024, they've turned their sights on years gone by, with a release that is heavy with a sense of time spent, and regrets weighed and assessed. That said, it's also quite possibly their loveliest record to date.
The newest Saint Etienne long-player, the flat-out magnificent The Night is a journey through a remembered past, a trip "Through the Glass" as one song puts it. Opener "Settle In" finds Sarah giving instructions, with "Half-Light", the lead single, being the amorphous slip of a song that points the way through the hazy memories of years long since passed (to quote a Virginia Astley tune, given as how there's a similar vibe here). Spoken word invocations from Sarah in "Ellar Carr" segue into the pastoral "When You Were Young", a track redolent with a nostalgia that fuels the central lyrical concerns on this 2024 effort from the trio. A cor Anglais (I think) underpins the piano, with Sarah's voice -- and the woodland sounds behind it -- circling the hook and drawing us in. The central line of "When you were young" even resurfaces later on the album, linking "Alone Together" thematically with "When You Were Young" more obviously. So much of The Night has an effect like that, where the past seems to be creeping in around the edges of the music, that the overall mood is one which allows space for a listener to be reminded again what a treasure this three-piece have always been. Elsewhere, "Gold" makes that nostalgia even more explicit:
"Will it be gold?
Tell me my fortune
Will it be gold? I want to see what you can see
Gold, I want to conquer time."
In that one, the simple melody expands as instruments enter the picture, and it's one of many compositions here where the precision of Saint Etienne in assembling their vision on The Night is most clear. The tinkling intro melody of "Hear My Heart", to use another example, repeats and then is remade and expanded into larger forms around Sarah's simple vocals. There's emotion here, simply rendered, and the directness of the hook gives the basic lyrics weight and urgency. When the track finally opens up, it's a wonderful, borderline symphonic moment.
This is, ultimately, an effort steeped in minimalism and English classical traditions more than the dance-floor dreams of past releases from these English treaures, and it's a record difficult to categorize, and wonderfully so, I should add. A throwback to the days when an LP was a journey, when you saved up and bought a record, took it home, parked in front of the turntable and speakers, and lost yourself; it's that kind of thing here on The Night.
The Night by Saint Etienne is out via Heavenly Recordings on Friday, December 13, 2024.
[Photo: Paul Kelly]