SAINT ETIENNE
Tales From Turnpike House
Savoy Jazz
· British trio Saint Etienne return with some fine Beach Boys-inspired harmonies and a little help from David Essex.
Over the past 13 or so years, Saint Etienne have made a career mixing lounge music and classic ’60s English pop with more contemporary dance sounds. Their eighth album, Tales From Turnpike House, is no exception, but this time they’ve added impressive vocal harmonies to singer Sarah Cracknell’s breathy tones, courtesy of guest arranger Tony Rivers (who made his own Brit-surf music with The Castaways four decades ago). Thus songs like "Side Streets" and "Sun in my Morning" transcend their roots as tales of life in a world where you don’t always have a say in what happens to you or the world in which you live.
Not that there’s anything wrong with these themes or in the traditional Saint Etienne combination of synthesized beats and pure pop melodies. In fact, on Turnpike House, the trio (Cracknell’s joined by Pete Wiggs and Bob Stanley, who are responsible for the non-singing bits) may be at their lyrical best, capturing the bittersweetness of ending affairs ("A Good Thing") and the decline of old comforts in a modern age ("Teenage Winter"). The connection of present to past continues with David Essex (best known to Canadian audiences as the singer of "Rock On," though he had a much broader career in the U.K.) having songwriting credit on "I’m Falling," one of the album’s brightest pop songs. The British pressing of Turnpike House includes a number of songs not on the domestic release and an altered song order. This makes me wonder why they’d keep "Oh My," a semi-heavy song that destroys the flow of this otherwise warm and interesting record.
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