The End of The Earth

New review up on Blogcritics (reproduced below for your enjoyment):

Finisterre literally means The End of The Earth.

As usual, fans of Saint Etienne are left to puzzle over the subtext (if any), while the band itself publicly insists that it was simply taken from a now-discontinued location on the BBC Shipping News. Is the band breaking up? Do they think that they've reached the end of their artistic journey? Or, in more typical fashion, is it simply a giant inside joke?

While I'll leave it to others to debate any hidden messages that the band has left behind, there is no doubt about the album itself. Finisterre is a welcome return to form for this English pop trio who spent the entirety of their last album (the interesting if ultimately weightless Sound of Water) stuck in the soundscapes of German electronica.

The band -- consisting of Sarah Cracknell, Pete Wiggs, and Bob Stanley -- has returned to England (Sound of Water was made in Berlin and Good Humor was recorded in Sweden) to make a distinctly English album, punctuated by the voice of actor Michael Jayston (I've never heard of him either, but he's apparently one of those character actors who makes you say, in a Pavlovesque reaction, "hey, I've seen that guy before") providing inter-track spoken-word interludes (sample: "Our Father, who art in Heaven, please stay there").

While they haven't gone back to the organic live sound of Good Humor, the new album is clearly an attempt to return to the clever dance-oriented pop that has been their traditional stomping grounds. While Finisterre does not match up with some of their earlier efforts (the astonishing Foxbase Alpha, the crystalline So Tough, and the glorious Tiger Bay (one of the best albums of the 1990s and one of the most misunderstood)), it is still miles beyond the vast majority of popular music churned out by the recording industry today.

"Action", the first single and the lead track of the CD, is a cheery, upbeat euro-disco (I've been informed that the correct word to use here is "house") track vaguely reminiscent of recent Kylie Minogue, awash in shimmering keyboards and a propulsively thumping four-on-the-floor drumbeat. A surefire floorburner, the relentlessly hedonistic music masks the content of the lyrics, which are actually about suburban ennui and a desire to return to the halcyon days of youth. In a sense, this is a typical Etienne single: upbeat, cheerful, populist music with a twist in the lyrics.

The Saint enlists the services of the English rapper Wildflower on the track "Soft Like Me", a paean to the positive powers of femininity with a sunny, bouncy chorus that you can almost imagine Karen Carpenter singing. The genius of this song is how it places praise for the qualities of emotional openness and tenderness in the context of rap -- an American genre noted for brutish masculinity and misogyny. I would use the word "subvert" here, but I've been informed that only licensed Academics can use it without irony.

"Stop and Think It Over" is a ballad that would, in most hands, turn irredeemably syrupy; the regret in Cracknell's breathy voice and the musically unresolved ending keeps the track from toppling over entirely into mush.

"Shower Scene" is another house (that is the right word to use, right?) anthem with utterly obtuse lyrical content ("in the rain/in the fall/in the mud/in the hall/in the rain/in the fog/in the shice/call my name" are pretty much all the lyrics of the four-and-a-half-minute song); interpretation of what that actually means is fairly open.

Like all clever pop bands, Saint Etienne has often been accused of being too self-referential; they do nothing to refute this charge on Finisterre. The track "The Way We Live Now" is clearly a reference to "The Way We Used To Live", a nine-minute single off of Sound of Water; the band name-checks one of their own songs in "B92," a satiric take on the music industry.

The one thing from previous Saint Etienne albums that rabid fans might miss is the constant sense of Ameriphilia; there are, as far as I can tell, virtually no explicitly American references on the album (which is rather unusual for a band that has produced songs titled "Erica America", "The Boy Scouts of America", "I Buy American Records", and "Zipcode", among others). The closest they come is in "Finisterre", the last track on the CD. Sarah Churchill (any relation to the PM? I don't know) intones "I believe in Donovan over Dylan, a laugh over cynicism" during a memerizing interior monologue, a retreat into the landscape of the mind. The final chorus -- "Finisterre, to tear it down and start again" -- is maybe a message, perhaps a manifesto, and, possibly, a hint for those wondering what the band is trying to do.