Tag: Saint Etienne

AF 2021 IN REVIEW: Our Favorite Albums & Singles of The Year

If you went into 2021 with high expectations, you weren’t alone. Even if it was hard to feel optimistic this time last year, it certainly seemed as if things could get no worse. Live music did return, after all – though with the appearance of Delta, and now Omicron, the joyful noise comes with a caveat. After sixteen months of having to livestream shows (fun, but not the same) little could stop me from attending shows in person; wearing a mask as an extra precaution felt like no big deal, even if no one else was doing it. But luck (and vaccines) feel like the real reason I emerged unscathed from dozens of risky experiences, and with performances on the horizon canceled once again, maybe it’s wise to enter 2022 with slightly lower expectations.

There’s always recorded music, anyhow. Maybe the tumult of the year just has me personally feeling a bit unfocused, but it seems as though I barely scaled the mountain of this year’s musical offerings without getting a bit buried in the avalanche of releases – ones that had been pushed back, ones that were created in lockdown. I’ll be playing catch up well into the new year, but that doesn’t mean there weren’t gems I connected with almost immediately, and very deeply. And that’s what I’ve heard across the board, from those in the industry as well as casual music fans – is that our favorites this year stayed on heavy rotation, as we latched onto music that accurately reflected our moods, which evolved moment to moment and of course happened to be different for all of us at any given time. What does that mean for year-end lists? Audiofemme has always compiled an eclectic list, including favorites from each of our contributors without overall rank – consider any repeats to be the best of the best. But this year, the list seems even more diverse, meaning there’s a wealth of weird and wonderful music below to discover, dear reader. Thanks for sticking with us through another wild year.

EDITOR LISTS

  • Marianne White (Executive Director)
    • Top 10 Albums:
      1) PinkPantheress – to hell with it
      2) Mdou Moctar – Afrique Victime
      3) Low – Hey What
      4) Jazmine Sullivan – Heaux Tales
      5) Julien Baker – Little Oblivions
      6) Dawn Richard – Second Line: An Electro Revival
      7) Indigo De Souza – Any Shape You Take
      8) aya – im hole
      9) Flock of Dimes – Head of Roses
      10) Tyler, the Creator – CALL ME IF YOU GET LOST
    • Top 5 Singles:
      1) Japanese Breakfast – “Be Sweet”
      2) Loraine James (feat. Eden Samara) – “Running Like That”
      3) Hand Habits – “More Than Love”
      4) Sharon Van Etten & Angel Olsen – “Like I Used To”
      5) Julien Baker – “Faith Healer (Half Waif Remix)”

  • Lindsey Rhoades (Editor-in-Chief)
    • Top 10 Albums:
      1) Low – Hey What
      2) Tirzah – Colourgrade
      3) Nana Yamato – Before Sunrise
      4) Emma Ruth Rundle – Engine of Hell
      5) Jane Weaver – Flock
      6) Tonstartssbandht – Petunia
      7) Arlo Parks – Collapsed in Sunbeams
      8) Squirrel Flower – Planet (i)
      9) Veik – Surrounding Structures
      10) Cassandra Jenkins – An Overview on Phenomenal Nature
    • Top 10 Singles:
      1) Sharon Van Etten & Angel Olsen – “Like I Used To”
      2) Special Interest – “All Tomorrow’s Carry”
      3) Squid – “G.S.K.”
      4) Julien Baker – “Bloodshot”
      5) Mandy, Indiana – “Bottle Episode”
      6) Remember Sports – “Pinky Ring”
      7) Cedric Noel – “Comuu”
      8) Gustaf – “Mine”
      9) June Jones – “Therapy”
      10) MAN ON MAN – “Stohner”

  • Mandy Brownholtz (Marketing Director)
    • Top 5 Albums (in no particular order):
      Spellling – The Turning Wheel
      King Woman – Celestial Blues
      Macy Rodman – Unbelievable Animals
      Marissa Nadler – The Path of the Clouds
      Kinlaw – The Tipping Scale
    • Top 3 Singles (in no particular order):
      Often – “Deep Sleep”
      Mannequin Pussy – “Control”
      Spice – “A Better Treatment”

STAFF LISTS

  • Alexa Peters (Playing Seattle)
    • Top 10 Albums:
      1) Wye Oak – Cut All The Wires: 2009-2011
      2) Dori Freeman – Ten Thousand Roses
      3) Isaiah Rashad – The House Is Burning
      4) Fawn Wood – Kåkike
      5) Carmen Q. Rothwell – Don’t Get Comfy / Nowhere
    • Honorable Mention: Mike Gebhart – Co-Pilot 
    • Top 3 Singles:
      1) Doja Cat (feat. SZA) – “Kiss Me More”
      2) Mitski – “Working for the Knife”
      3) DoNormaal – “Baby May”

  • Cat Woods (Playing Melbourne)
    • Top 5 Albums:
      1) Deap Vally – Marriage
      2) Mod Con – Modern Condition
      3) Laura Stevenson – Laura Stevenson
      4) Joan As Police Woman – The Solution is Restless
      5) Black Country, New Road – For the first time
    • Top 3 Singles:
      1) Black Country, New Road – “Sunglasses”
      2) Lana Del Rey – “Dealer”
      3) jennylee – “Tickles”

  • Liz Ohanesian (Contributor)
    • Top 5 Albums:
      1) Hackedepicciotto — The Silver Threshold
      2) Saint Etienne — I’ve Been Trying to Tell You
      3) L’impératrice — Take Tsubo
      4) Pearl and the Oysters— Flowerland
      5) Nuovo Testamento — New Earth
    • Top 3 Singles:
      1) Midnight Magic – “Beam Me Up” 
      2) Jessie Ware – “Please”
      3) Gabriels – “Love and Hate in a Different Time (Kerri Chandler Remix)”  

  • Gillian G. Gaar (Musique Boutique)
    • Top 5 Albums:
      1) Dolphin Midwives — Body of Water
      2) Sarah McQuaid — The St. Buryan Sessions
      3) Low — Hey What 
      4) Witch Camp — I’ve Forgotten Now Who I Used to Be 
      5) Full Bush — Movie Night
    • Top 3 Singles:
      1) Maggie Herron — “Sweet Lullaby”
      2) Sleater-Kinney — “High in the Grass”
      3) ONETWOTHREE — “Give Paw” 

  • Jason Scott (Contributor)
    • Top 5 Albums:
      1) Jetty Bones – Push Back
      2) M.A.G.S. – Say Things That Matter
      3) Lyndsay Ellyn – Queen of Nothing
      4) Kacey Musgraves – star-crossed
      5) Christian Lopez – The Other Side
    • Top 5 Singles:
      1) Hayes Carll – “Help Me Remember”
      2) Jake Wesley Rogers – “Middle of Love”
      3) Adele – “To Be Loved”
      4) Carly Pearce – “What He Didn’t Do”
      5) Kacey Musgraves – “what doesn’t kill me”

  • Michelle Rose (Contributor)
    • Top 5 Albums:
      1) Alex Orange Drink – Everything Is Broken, Maybe That’s O​.​K.
      2) Billie Eilish – Happier Than Ever
      3) Kacey Musgraves – star-crossed
      4) Magdalena Bay – Mercurial World
      5) Japanese Breakfast – Jubilee
    • Top 3 Singles:
      1) Blonder – “Ice Cream Girl” 
      2) Mitski – “The Only Heartbreaker”
      3) Kristiane – “Better On Your Own”  

  • Victoria Moorwood (Playing Cincy)
    • Top 5 Albums:
      1) Polo G – Hall of Fame
      2) Benny the Butcher & Harry Fraud – The Plugs I Met 2
      3) Megan Thee Stallion – Something For Thee Hotties
      4) Pooh Shiesty – Shiesty Sessions
      5) blackbear – misery lake
    • Top 3 Singles:
      1) Benny the Butcher & Harry Fraud – “Thanksgiving”
      2) Lil Nas X (feat. Jack Harlow)  – “INDUSTRY BABY”
      3) 24kGoldn (feat. Future) – “Company”

  • Jamila Aboushaca (Contributor)
    • Top 5 Albums:
      1) Kacey Musgraves – star-crossed
      2) Snoh Aalegra – Temporary Highs in the Violet Skies 
      3) Lil Nas X – Montero
      4) Darkside – Spiral
      5) Blu DeTiger – How Did We Get Here EP
    • Top 3 Singles:
      1) Kaytranada (feat. H.E.R.) – “Intimidated”
      2) Kacey Musgraves – “simple times”
      3) Snoh Aalegra – “In Your Eyes”

  • Sophia Vaccaro (Playing the Bay)
    • Top 5 Albums:
      1) Aly & AJ – A Touch of the Beat Gets You Up on Your Feet Gets You Out and Then Into the Sun
      2) Julia Wolf – Girls in Purgatory (Full Moon Edition)
      3) Megan Thee Stallion – Something For Thee Hotties
      4) Lil Mariko – Lil Mariko
      5) Destroy Boys – Open Mouth, Open Heart
    • Top 3 Singles:
      1) daine – “dainecore”
      2) Julia Wolf – “Villain”
      3) Doja Cat – “Need To Know”

  • Sam Weisenthal (Contributor)
    • Top 5 Albums:
      1) Indigo De Souza – Any Shape You Take
      2) Katy Kirby – Cool Dry Place
      3) Mega Bog – Life, and Another
      4) Ada Lea – one hand on the steering wheel the other sewing a garden
      5) Olivia Kaplan – Tonight Turns to Nothing
    • Top 3 Singles:
      1) Charlotte Cornfield – “Drunk For You” 
      2) Dora Jar – “Multiply”
      3) Joe Taylor Sutkowski, Dirt Buyer – “What Luck, Goodbye”  

  • Sara Barron (Playing Detroit)
    • Top 5 Albums:
      1) PinkPantheress – to hell with it
      2) Summer Walker – Still Over It
      3) Erika de Casier – Sensational
      4) Jazmine Sullivan – Heaux Tales
      5) Adele – 30
    • Top 3 Singles:
      1) Lana Del Rey – “Dealer”
      2) Liv.e – “Bout It”
      3) SZA – “I Hate U”

  • Eleanor Forrest (Contributor)
    • Top 5 Albums:
      1) Arlo Parks – Collapsed in Sunbeams
      2) CL – ALPHA
      3) My Life As Ali Thomas – Peppermint Town
      4) Halsey – If I Can’t Have Love, I Want Power
      5) Remember Sports – Like a Stone
    • Top 3 Singles:
      1) FKA twigs (feat. Central Cee) – “Measure of a Man”
      2) Sabriel – “Pulse”
      3) Lexie Liu – “有吗炒面 ALGTR”

Saint Etienne Samples Y2K Pop and Name-drops Racehorses on I’ve Been Trying to Tell You LP

Photo Credit: Elaine Constantine

Prior to the U.K.’s COVID-19 shutdown in 2020, Saint Etienne had been working on a new album inside a small, London recording studio. The album (which, by singer Sarah Cracknell’s estimates, was about two-thirds complete) was put on hold with the onset of the pandemic. In the meantime, the long-running indie pop trio got sidetracked with a socially-distanced musical experiment – and before long, a whole new concept album emerged. 

“We didn’t know what the end product would be,” says Pete Wiggs on a recent Zoom call from his home studio in Hove. “We weren’t thinking this would be another album.” And yet, that’s exactly what it became.

I’ve Been Trying to Tell You, out September 10, is the tenth full-length album from the British trio. In the 31 years that have passed since Saint Etienne’s first single, a cover of Neil Young’s song “Only Love Can Break Your Heart,” the group has forged a path that crosses indie pop, dance, and experimental electronic music. They’ve moved dance floors with songs like “Nothing Can Stop Us” and “He’s on the Phone,” garnered critical acclaim for albums like Sound of Water (2000) and Words and Music By Saint Etienne (2012) and have kept diehards hooked with their fan club releases and other limited edition material. 

One of those rare releases – specifically a 2018 EP called Surrey North – serves as a precursor of sorts for I’ve Been Trying to Tell You. Wiggs had wanted to further some of the production techniques used in the making of the EP. “I got some new toys, some new software, that I wanted to explore,” he says. 

The concept, though, came from Saint Etienne member Bob Stanley. Wiggs explains that Stanley had wanted to use samples from a specific period of the 1990s and to pull from releases that were fairly popular at the time. Ultimately, I’ve Been Trying to Tell You includes barely-recognizable snippets of hits from artists Natalie Imbruglia, Samantha Mumba, The Lightning Seeds and others. 

“We got really into it and then Sarah did some vocals on quite a few and it became something bigger,” says Wiggs. At one point, they realized that they had grown more fond of this project than the album they had been recording pre-pandemic. 

Saint Etienne worked on the songs remotely, with Wiggs in Hove, Cracknell in Oxfordshire and Stanley in West Yorkshire. Cracknell recorded vocals with her son as engineer and sent the pieces to Wiggs. “I wouldn’t necessarily know where they would go, so I could pick and choose and treat them like samples in a way and chop this out and play around with it,” he says. 

Cracknell, too, says she was interested in something more “atmosphere-led” rather than focusing on the lyrics. “I thought that it would be nice to have something where you imagine something, a bit cinematic, in your mind,” she says. There’s also a nod to the Cocteau Twins in her approach for this album. “I’m a bit of Cocteau Twins fan and I like that Liz Fraser used to make up words and things, her own vocabulary, so I have a bit of that as well,” says Cracknell. 

The samples are primarily culled from music released in the late 1990s and early 2000s, a conceptual decision that reflects the theme of the album. “The concept behind that was that it was a period where the Tony Blair government had come in,” says Wiggs. “Initially, everyone was very excited and optimistic about things. Then, it all sort of went wrong with various wars and things like that. Big business still being involved. It wasn’t as great as we thought it was going to be.”

The songs are all named after horses who ran in the Grand National race between the years 1996 and 1998, which parallels the historical reflection. “There’s a sense of optimism with betting on a horse, but it often goes tits up,” Wiggs points out.

Photographer Alasdair McLellan created a film to accompany the album, and both are a poignant reflection upon memory at a time when the music and fashion surrounding the turn of the 21st century has come back in vogue. “I suppose that I think that there’s a lot of looking back and referencing those years in popular music now, especially here – lots of people are doing songs that sound like they’re from that period and it’s influenced a lot of people,” says Wiggs.

He adds, “Bob was saying that kids maybe think of it as being all great back then.” Wiggs contemplates the possibility that Saint Etienne, at one point, may have felt the same way about the music and culture of the 1960s. 

“I think that we’ve always tried to make music that reflects stuff that we like and we’re really into music from the past, but we’re always trying to make something new,” he says. Wiggs notes the advent of 21st century technologies that allow producers to closely mimic the sounds of old soul records. “Sometimes it feels like that’s a bit of a pastiche,” he says, “but, maybe, in the ‘90s, if we were able to do that, we would have done that.”

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Why It’s Time to Revisit 2000 Saint Etienne Album Sound of Water

Photo Credit: Rob Baker Ashton

Twenty years ago, Saint Etienne released Sound of Water. It was the fifth full-length album for the British trio of Sarah Cracknell, Bob Stanley and Pete Wiggs and it was an ever-so-slight departure for a band that had spent the 1990s at the intersection of indie pop and dance music. On the jacket notes, music journalist Simon Reynolds wrote, “Saint Etienne understand that ‘lovely’ is the new edge.” At the time, the album was touted as a pop take on what was then happening in underground electronic music.

For Sound of Water, Saint Etienne collaborated with To Rococo Rot, the German band that had garnered its own following in the late ’90s for their post-rock-inflected electronic music. They also worked with Sean O’Hagan, of the bands Mircrodisney and The High Llamas, who had played on beloved Stereolab albums like Mars Audiac Quintet and Emperor Tomato Ketchup. With that line-up, Sound of Water was a very heady indie outing that would go on to foreshadow the emerging century in unexpected ways.

By the dawn of the 21st century, Saint Etienne was firmly established as a cult band. Stanley and Wiggs emerged in the early ’90s with “Only Love Can Break Your Heart,” a radical transformation of the 1970 Neil Young song into a cover that was ethereal, groovy and representative of the era when rock, pop and rave lovingly collided. Originally conceived as a duo with rotating vocalists, Saint Etienne introduced Cracknell to the fold with their third single, “Nothing Can Stop Us” (Moira Lambert sang on “Only Love Can Break Your Heart”). As a trio, they would go on to create a body of work that often alternated between indie pop with a vintage vibe and contemporary dance music. They had their share of club hits, notably with “He’s On the Phone,” a collaboration with French singer Étienne Daho, and wooed the college radio crowd with their 1998 album Good Humor, released on beloved labels Creation in U.K. and Sub Pop in the U.S.

Saint Etienne was in the midst of a creative peak; the previous year, they had released the EP Places to Visit, which featured the wistful house track “We’re in the City,” known to indie film fans for its use in But I’m a Cheerleader. Just a few weeks after the release with Sound of Water, the band was featured on Paul van Dyk’s single, “Tell Me Why (The Riddle),” which remains their biggest international chart hit. With all that they had been doing, one might have expected for Saint Etienne to drop an album of dance floor bangers. Instead, they took time to hang out in the chill out room. It was a cool move from a band that had long been full of those.

Reviews, however, were mixed. Pitchfork said it was “ear-candy all the way through.” Meanwhile, AV Club remarked,” Saint Etienne has acknowledged a strong Krautrock influence on Sound Of Water, but it would be better off staying in touch with its inner ABBA rather than its inner Can.”

Even Stanley would have his own criticisms of the project. Nine years later, he reflected on the album in an interview with Pitchfork. “Coming into 2000, we were listening to a lot of electronica, some German and sort of West Coast electronica at the time, and we wanted to do something in that vein, production-wise,” he said in the interview, “And again, it could’ve done with a couple of things that sounded like singles.”

I loved Sound of Water upon its release and my vinyl copy has been a staple of at-home listening for many years. It’s an album best heard in its entirety, an eclectic collection that plays with everything from baroque pop (“Late Morning”) to bossa nova (“Boy Is Crying”) to IDM (“Don’t Back Down”), but always with a singular vision tying it together.

Even in the clubs, in those early years of the ’00s, I would drop “Heart Failed (In the Back of a Taxi),” perhaps the most accessible single from Sound of Water. Typically, I would play it early or late in the night. With a tight beat and melancholy atmosphere, that song lent itself to either warming up the indie crowd on the dance floor or calming people down near last call. In the middle of the night, though, I continued to gravitate towards “We’re in the City.” Listening to Sound of Water twenty years later, it’s striking to hear how the band seemingly predicted the avant-pop wave of artists, “vibey” DJ sets and “soft dance” playlists of the ’10s. It’s the band’s most prescient album and an essential one.

Timing is everything, and Sound of Water came out at a particularly odd moment. While 2000 was a stellar year for music, it’s also underrated. A small handful of albums – Madonna’s Music, Outkast’s Stankonia, Radiohead’s Kid A – would become instant classics. Other releases, like Peaches’ breakthrough album The Teaches of Peaches and Ladytron’s EP Commodore Rock, would cement the sound of the first decade of the new century. And some albums were so far ahead of the curve that it would take years to catch up with them. Sound of Water falls into that last category.