Foxbase Alpha (1991)

Saint Etienne's first album is so clever about the way it puts itself across that it's easy to miss the dull patches and the silly, ultimately tiresome foofaraw that lards it all up between the songs proper. The first thing it does, after 43 seconds of said nonsense, is throw up a cover of Neil Young's "Only Love Can Break Your Heart" that is so audacious it is almost dazzling. All long-time Young fans, however, have been well aware since at least the release of the 1970 album with the original that Young has a certain and undeniable facility with melody (even, as on Trans, in Saint-Etienne-friendly electronics-/dance-heavy settings). (That's not Saint Etienne mainstay Sarah Cracknell singing on the Young cover, by the way, but Moira Lambert; Cracknell evidently was not yet fully on board, something hard to imagine at this point.) The songs here that work best for me now are things like "Carnt Sleep," "Girl VII," or "Nothing Can Stop Us"—all of which put Cracknell out front where she belongs, all soaring with deceptively simple beats, aching sweet strings, and vague wisps of poignant situation, structured to hit hard when you least expect it, capable of opening up a space in all the airy-fairy through which rockets of effect can blast and land hard. I listen to the way "Spring," for example, enters into itself, almost instantly pleasurable, the simple beats and a few simple lines, the strings sneaking in behind nearly imperceptibly, and suddenly I am in a place where springtime and spring fever mean something again, the possibilities for love and happiness are written into the strain of Cracknell's voice and the strange filters of production through which it is steeped. But now I'm reduced to merely describing effect. How exactly they do it is a rather more difficult matter to explain, except by way of the overbroad "songwriting." Whatever it is, it comes and goes, virtually disappearing altogether on songs such as "She's the One" (which name-checks "He Hit Me" for no apparent reason) or "London Belongs to Me," and especially in the longer so-called house exercises such as "Stoned to Say the Least" or "Like the Swallow," both of which run to upwards of seven minutes. Thank God it's so easy now to skip about among songs on albums.