Saint Etienne Tales From Turnpike House CD

Additional Tracks

Personnel: Sarah Cracknell (vocals).
Audio Mixers: Ian Catt; Tim Powell .
Recording information: Cat Music; Needham Sound; The Old Vicarage.
Saint Etienne, the U.K.'s foremost purveyors of indie dance pop, returned in 2006 with TALES FROM TURNPIKE HOUSE. The trio is in excellent form here, revisiting the propulsive disco and house-inflected fare of their earlier releases on cuts like "A Good Thing" and "Stars Above Us." Yet songwriters/producers Pete Wiggs and Bob Stanley are as steeped in music history as ever, harking back to the 1960s harmony-heavy pop of the Beach Boys ("Sun in My Morning") and the wiry sounds of '80s new wave ("Oh My").
Sarah Cracknell's breathy vocals add just the right amount of breeziness and luster to these pop confections. The album's best moments, in fact, are its quietest, when Cracknell's sultry whisper and Wiggs and Stanley's glossy arrangements and production are brought into perfect balance (the bossa nova-themed opener "Side Streets" and the hazy, downtempo "Dream Lover" are two cases in point). Beautifully conceived and executed, TALES FROM TURNPIKE HOUSE is a refreshing dose of electronic pop purity.
No matter the associates or variables involved, a Saint Etienne album is always going to end up sounding just like a Saint Etienne album, even if it's a little different from what came before it. On Tales from Turnpike House, the group gets two productions from Xenomania (Girls Aloud, Sugababes), several vocal arrangements from Tony Rivers (the Castaways, Harmony Grass) and son, some songwriting and vocal contributions from the misunderstood David Essex ("Rock On," "Stardust"), and assorted things from faces old and new. The album comes out as their most organic since 1998's Good Humor; even the tracks driven by programming are warm in comparison to vast chunks of both Sound of Water and Finisterre. The concept -- a day in the life of fictional characters who live in a house that does indeed exist -- allows for a range of material that's as broad as what can be heard on any other Saint Etienne album. The glitzy dance-pop of "Stars Above Us" ("Stars above us, cars below us/Nothing can touch us, baby"), for example, precedes the ruminative "Teenage Winter," containing an all-too-sharp expression of the resisted shift away from adolescent fanaticism ("And in the charity shop...not much left on the doorstep recently/Something to do with eBay, Johnny reckons/He's bidding on it now, for a Subbuteo catalog '81-'82/He'll win it, put it in a drawer and forget he ever bought it"). Though the other dancefloor-ready songs -- the sleek, silken "A Good Thing" and the sweetly lacerating "Lightning Strikes Twice" -- have major presence, the gentler moments, thriving on easy-to-miss intricacies and enlivening vocal arrangements (the Rivers men are astute Beach Boys disciples), are especially generous with their charms. [The U.S. version, released on Savoy Jazz (this is not a joke), has a substantially different sequence and three tracks not present on the original U.K. issue. The best of the three is the B-side "I'm Falling," a David Essex collaboration that is gorgeously melancholy and not far off from an atmospheric version of Places to Visit's "We're in the City." Unfortunately, it does not contain Essex' vocal contribution, "Relocate." It's understandable that the label would want to add tracks to the album to differentiate it from a version that had been released months prior, but the resequencing and swapping out of tracks is a real head-scratcher.] ~ Andy Kellman

Rolling Stone (p.64) - 3.5 stars out of 5 -- "[A]n unabashedly joyful celebration of being British...[it] could make an Anglophile out of anyone."
Magnet (p.111) - "TALES is unabashedly domestic, and to avoid being too groove-heavy or sleepy, it's sequenced to pogo between lite ballads and dance-floor fodder."