At the wedding of a childhood friend, my mother got up and danced harder than I’d ever seen in my entire life. The DJ was mixing a fairly aggressive set of Lebanese dabke music, and somehow, between the poignance of the occasion, the beat’s unfamiliar pulse, and the stuttering flash of a strobe light, I caught a glimpse of her as she was at 20 years old. As soon as I registered what I was witnessing, the track broke away and the lights went down. A disco ball glinted across the room and illuminated her face, and though the years had caught up with her, the continuity between her many lives seemed to linger. After what felt like a small eternity, the present reasserted itself with a needle scratch, a roaring crowd, and another pummeling rush of noise.
Music’s ability to suspend, sustain, and reverse time is one of its most powerful and mysterious qualities. The philosopher Susanne Langer believed that this property of “time made audible” was essential to the colorful, parallel dimensions that music can conjure. It also helps explain the wormhole effect, in which moments (and even years) can be compressed into a handful of notes and sprung again in an instant. Few musicians have understood these dynamics as masterfully as Saint Etienne. Since the early 1990s, Bob Stanley, Pete Wiggs, and Sarah Cracknell have mapped the elements of dance music onto a listener’s most tender feelings of longing, optimism, and nostalgia. A song like early masterpiece “Avenue” echoes through the ages in real time, capturing a love affair in the crossfade between young abandon and adult knowingness. The only thing more remarkable than the track’s panorama of swirling memory and conflicted feeling is how brilliantly and consistently the band was able to conjure it throughout its records.
Over the course of more than three decades, Saint Etienne have matured with their music, and they have mostly used this longevity to their advantage. But for every song that’s grappled with an adult overview of human experience, on recent records they’ve struck a world-weary note, as though aware that more yesterdays than tomorrows await the three middle-aged musicians. With their 13th and final album, International, Saint Etienne aim to go out on top, with one more blaze of fun and passion in the spirit of their best work. It is a graceful but slightly anticlimactic grand finale: a victory lap over well-trodden ground that eagerly commands the spotlight before it goes out for good.
