A Sense of Doubt blog post #2624 - I've Been Trying to Tell You by Saint Etienne - Musical Monday 2204.25
I was surprised to find out there was a new Saint Etienne album last year that I missed until now.
I've Been Trying to Tell You by Saint Etienne
Background[edit]
The album marks the band's first sample-based record since So Tough (1993). Bob Stanley described it as "about optimism, and the late nineties, and how memory is an unreliable narrator".[10]
Critical reception[edit]
I've Been Trying to Tell You received a weighted average score of 83 out of 100 from eight reviews on Metacritic, indicating "universal acclaim".[3] Tim Sendra of AllMusic called it "a concept album that looks to extract the optimistic sound of late '90s mainstream pop and twist it into a suite of songs that feel like the half-remembered afterimages of a dream".[4] Reviewing the album for Pitchfork, Jesse Dorris wrote that the album "feels passive, lost in nostalgia for an age it hasn't fully reckoned with".[8]
Track listing[edit]
| No. | Title | Length |
|---|---|---|
| 1. | "Music Again" | 5:45 |
| 2. | "Pond House" | 4:02 |
| 3. | "Fonteyn" | 4:50 |
| 4. | "Little K" | 5:45 |
| 5. | "Blue Kite" | 4:51 |
| 6. | "I Remember It Well" | 3:50 |
| 7. | "Penlop" | 5:30 |
| 8. | "Broad River" | 5:35 |
| Total length: | 40:08 | |
Sample credits
- "Music Again" samples "Love of a Lifetime" by Honeyz (1998).[7]
- "Pond House" samples "Beauty on the Fire" by Natalie Imbruglia (2001).[7]
- "Fonteyn" samples "Raincloud" by Lighthouse Family (1997).[7]
- "Little K" samples "'Til the Night Becomes the Day" by Samantha Mumba (2000).[7]
- "Penlop" samples "Joy" by the Lightning Seeds (1990).[7]
- "Broad River" samples "Ripped Inside" by Tasmin Archer (1992).[11]
I’ve Been Trying to Tell You
In his book Musicophilia: Tales of Music and the Brain, the neurologist and author Oliver Sacks samples the following quote from biologist Gerald Edelman: “Every act of memory is to some degree an act of imagination.” For 30 years now, British pop heroes Saint Etienne have made songs out of their recollections and record collections. Saint Etienne’s songs anticipate big nights out, practice self-care the morning after, call for more, more, more—all with equal panache. Their music collapses the timeline. “I feel nostalgia for an age yet to come,” the actor Michael Jayston says at the end of a lovely meditation on ’60s psyche and ’90s ambient from 2002’s Finisterre.
I’ve Been Trying to Tell You, the band’s 10th album, takes as its subject a moment from the end of the 20th century when pop music discovered it could loop almost any sound into a hook, and multinational corporations sold the idea that music was less about the instant the needle hits the record and more a never-ending, ever-present stream of cool. Lead single “Pond House” is soundtrack-y in the way of fin de siecle pop, ebbing and flowing in a pool of rootless cosmopolitanism that is in fact grounded in a specific time and place. Gone is the urban-planning sophistipop of Saint Etienne’s previous album, 2017’s Home Counties; in its place, here comes… Natalie Imbruglia, courtesy of her 2001 single “Beauty on the Fire.” “Here it comes again,” Imbruglia sings, sampled, her phrasing bobbing among white-capped breaks, algal blooms of acid, and a bassline oceanic enough to return thoughts of the late genius Lee “Scratch” Perry, who famously evangelized that dub could change the past, as well as the future.
Whatever you think of Natalie Imbruglia, “Pond House” might not change your mind. You might even think it’s Saint Etienne’s recherché chanteuse Sarah Cracknell on the mic. The point is the vibe, an act of imagination in remembering downtempo radio pop as a mix of capitalist blissout and PTSD numbness. A track like “Fonteyn” rolls a piano vamp into a crisp little beat, then suddenly ignites into plumes of mood that could either fill the floors of an after-hours joint or score a Sephora. It’s a familiar sound, evocative of that time when clubbing became a consumable global lifestyle, expensive and escapist and extractive of local cultures. Saint Etienne are that most thoughtful of bands; a track like “Fonteyn” could use a bibliography. But it’s also a bit of a blur.
“Little K” swarms with birdsongs, which are too much with us on records today. In the moment Saint Etienne is remembering, though, they promised the coming of new dawns on ambient-house records and, like canaries in coal mines, warned of bass-driven destruction on jungle mixes. Saint Etienne uses them as field recordings, not metaphors. “No need to pretend,” Cracknell says in a cool, clear voice. Back then, climate change hovered on a distant horizon; today, birds face mass extinction. Saint Etienne captures them on record like they’re already gone.
Most of the album is similarly mournful: Opener “Music Again” tosses and turns in a haze of harpsichord before Cracknell (or someone) decides she “never had a way to go” and the track gives up. “Blue Kite” is a gloaming of fiddle and its echoes, lovely but falling short of the kind of full-on invocation of the spirits Coil achieved after dark at the century’s end. But “I Remember It Well” should be enshrined among the band’s loveliest of songs. Like Space Afrika’s recent stunner Honest Labour, “I Remember It Well” ascends Massive Attack’s Mezzanine in order to see Spiritualized floating in space. Guitars break hearts, beats heal them, a choir commiserates. If Saint Etienne ever give up on disco for good, they can always turn to post-rock.
Hopefully they won’t. Highlights like “I Remember” prove that acts of memory can be consolations. As a whole, though, I’ve Been Trying to Tell You could try a little harder. The album is accompanied by a film by Alasdair McLellan, a bit of which serves as a video for “Penlop.” It’s beautiful, all fuzzy lights and pretty boys on scooters, but a little bloodless. If only the stakes felt higher: that the songs were either catchier or deeper into dub, that in this moment Saint Etienne embodied a little of the brains and brawn of Oliver Sacks on a motorcycle. Or that, as in their eternal masterpiece “Like a Motorway,” music was a matter of life and death. The act of memory is an act, both deed and pose. I’ve Been Trying to Tell You feels passive, lost in nostalgia for an age it hasn’t fully reckoned with. Bet it sounds gorgeous on the radio.
https://albumism.com/reviews/saint-etienne-ive-been-trying-to-tell-you
Saint Etienne’s ‘I’ve Been Trying To Tell You’ Is an Immersive, Poignant Paean to the Comforts and Complexities of Memory
***ALBUM OF THE MONTH | September 2021***
Saint Etienne
I’ve Been Trying To Tell You
Heavenly
Buy via Official Store | 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.”
"Fonteyn" Saint Etienne
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.
"Broad River" - Saint Etienne
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”
BUY I’ve Been Trying To Tell You from Saint Etienne’s Official Store
SEE Saint Etienne on Tour | Dates
https://www.theupcoming.co.uk/2021/09/08/ive-been-trying-to-tell-you-movie-review/
I’ve Been Trying to Tell You
Being simultaneously nostalgic and relevant is a difficult balancing act. The recent trend towards 80s-themed media (exemplified best by Netflix’s Stranger Things) has never quite managed to do both, often being held back by its lack of a distinct identity. In the case of I’ve Been Trying to Tell You, a new collaborative film from Saint-Etienne and filmmaker Alasdair McLellan marking the release of the album of the same name, that certainly isn’t the case.
Drenched in sun-soaked summer vibes, the film moves from one location to another in the form of short vignettes, with sparse dialogue connecting the sections. It focuses on the lives of young people in the 90s across England, highlighting their carefree nature and independent lifestyles.
It’s a visual treat and McLellan deftly captures the hazy wonder of a British summer. Repeated use of slow motion and dolly shots give the scenes a dreamlike quality, which is accentuated by the excellent music. Even without the music however, the piece would still manage to stand on its own two feet as an example of excellent visual storytelling and, despite the lack of dialogue, it is easy to draw interesting narratives from the images.
Luckily, the music that accompanies these vignettes is also excellent. Returning to the sample-based production that made Saint-Etienne a household name three decades ago, this new material is the perfect accompaniment to McLellan’s dreamy visuals and is a wonderful listen. The use of samples alongside wonderfully engaging synthesiser melodies and some excellent singing from frontwoman Sarah Cracknell creates an atmosphere of immersive nostalgia, a particular highlight being the track Penlop.
It is this nostalgia that really makes I’ve Been Trying to Tell You a success. It would be possible to take the images from the film and find comparisons in today’s visual or fashion cultures; vintage and retro clothing has become a staple of current youth lifestyles, and there is a tendency for today’s photographers or artists to ape the tangible visual grain that McLellan captures here. The result definitely feels like a look back, but also doesn’t feel out of place in modern society, acting as a bridge between the remembered past and the lived present.
For fans of the band, it’s a must, and for fans of visual art, its short runtime and engaging visuals make it well worth a watch.
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- Bloggery committed by chris tower - 2204.25 - 10:10
- Days ago = 2488 days ago
- New note - On 1807.06, I ceased daily transmission of my Hey Mom feature after three years of daily conversations. I plan to continue Hey Mom posts at least twice per week but will continue to post the days since ("Days Ago") count on my blog each day. The blog entry numbering in the title has changed to reflect total Sense of Doubt posts since I began the blog on 0705.04, which include Hey Mom posts, Daily Bowie posts, and Sense of Doubt posts. Hey Mom posts will still be numbered sequentially. New Hey Mom posts will use the same format as all the other Hey Mom posts; all other posts will feature this format seen here.
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