Six Thousand

Today marks post number six thousand at Bagging Area, which is a big number which ever way you slice it. To mark this here's something new and rather wonderful from perennial Bagging Area favorites Saint Etienne. 

At the tail end of last year Saint Etienne released an album called The Night, a record made for misty dawns and murky autumnal days, for headphones at three in the morning and for losing oneself in. Much of it was ambient and found sounds,along with a wash of synths, Sarah Cracknell's voice occasionally appearing out of the haze, suddenly something sharp and clear. It was not really like anything they'd done before, very much a mood piece, an album that you could play and that would act as background noise, every now and then catching your attention. As it might with the song Alone Together, a guitar plinking into life, a lazy laptop drumbeat ticking slowly away, some chords and then Sarah singing. It was very much the most fully formed song on The Night and even then still a very loose, whispery, gauze- like song.

Alone Together

For the record, I loved the album but can see why it split opinion anong the Saint Etienne fanbase. Now the group have remixed Alone Together, released next month as a four track CD/ digital EP and two track 12". There is a remix each from Pete Wiggs and Bob Stanley (Bob's with Augustin Bousfield), an extended version of the album track and a Cosmodelica remix by Colleen Cosmo Murphy. Bob's remix, the Hove Lawns Sunset Mix, is a thing of beauty, the sound of summer come early, terraces in the Med at sunset, long days and long shadows, a properly Balearic remix. Shuffly drums, clipped guitar, piano, Sarah and at three minutes some horns that parp away just so... the flutter of strings, the gentle throb of electronic bass, Spanish guitar. It's a summer holiday pressed onto black wax. The video was, I suspect, not filmed in Hove.