The members of Saint Etienne have notoriously voracious appetites for pop music and are scholars of its history. One of them, Bob Stanley, has written the book on it. Therefore, Saint Etienne must be well aware that a pop act is fortunate if they last long enough for their sound to be defined and refined until it is instantly recognizable. Surely, they know that once this point is reached, staving off ennui becomes a real challenge.
To help meet that challenge, Stanley and his bandmates, fellow producer/keyboardist Pete Wiggs and vocalist Sarah Cracknell, have begun making concept albums, but not in the rock-opera sense. Home Counties (2017) was rooted in the titular outskirts of their London base. I’ve Been Trying to Tell You (2021) found the trio taking a conceptual approach to production, basing the tracks on manipulated samples of turn-of-the-millennium pop songs. It was a remix record that wasn’t, turning the source material into a fresh take on Saint Etienne’s trademark mix of whimsy and melancholy.
For the follow-up, The Night, Stanley, Wiggs, and Cracknell decided to make an ambient pop album, citing all-time classics like Talk Talk‘s Spirit of Eden and the KLF’s Chill Out as inspiration. As with I’ve Been Trying to Tell You, they teamed up with producer/composer Augustin Bousfield, who once again intensifies Saint Etienne’s already-lush cinematic sweep.
Saint Etienne’s albums have always had a significant element of ambience. On many of them, it is not uncommon to find snippets of incidental music, street commotion, and voices wafting in, seemingly from their subconscious, contributing to the inescapable nostalgia of their sound. These flourishes were always interstitial, woven around and between classicist pop songs. For the most part, on The Night, though, they are the songs. Or song, singular—the band have suggested that the whole album could play as a single, continuous track.
The Night, therefore, is something of a genre exercise. That in itself is not a problem. The problem is that the album never sounds like more than a genre exercise, sometimes becoming almost shockingly dull. A few of the 14 tracks do have structures that would, loosely, qualify as pop music. At least one of them, the delicate, jazzy “Half Light,” has the type of smooth, memorable melody that would qualify it as a single if it were more than a minute and a half long.
Generally speaking, Saint Etienne get the atmospherics right, too. That isn’t surprising, given their extensive experience with such things. Aided by Bousfield, they maintain a feeling of a downcast, rainy night, reverb-soaked reverie for the entire 40-plus minutes. “No Rush” conjures up the majestic, quasi-religious feel of Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark‘s early experiments. Meanwhile, “Northern Counties East” continues their fascination with dub music and harpsichords.
Several tracks are linked by spoken-work readings from Cracknell, vignettes and impressions that sound like the arch, quasi-literary essays that appear in Saint Etienne’s liner notes. Her dulcet voice is warm, soothing, and welcome. When it comes to the singing, though, the sometimes downright hokey lyrics and Cracknell’s penchant for sing-song delivery (ironically, a prime ingredient in their pop confections) undermine the dense, immersive atmosphere that’s been so painstakingly created.
In “When You Were Young”, Cracknell delivers the repeated mantra “Times we had, things you said” in an almost hectoring fashion. The trancelike “bah-bah-bah-ums” on “The Nightingale” are captivating, but the titular bird “sings a lonely tale”, an awkward turn of phrase. “Preflyte” plays like a touching Empty Nest Syndrome lament, but the sentiment is undone by a facile couplet like, “It’s your life, for goodness sake / Gonna make a few mistakes.”
To be sure, The Night has quite a bit going for it, including the meticulous arrangements and sound design, as well as the weight of Saint Etienne’s rich catalog and their status as respected elder statesmen of sophisticated pop music. Even so, The Night sounds uncharacteristically forced, ultimately collapsing under the weight of its own pretension.