Albums by this artist

The Misadventures Of Saint Etienne (1999)

Saint Etienne

The Misadventures Of Saint Etienne

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» DEVON REED | STAFF WRITER

Saint Etienne The Misadventures Of Saint Etienne L'appareil-Pho, 1999 RiYL: Belle & Sebastian, Dmitri From Paris, bad Stereolab

Here's a question. What do the Field Mice, Björk, and Stereolab all have in common? Answer: CDNow lists all of them as "similar artists" to Saint Etienne, those oh so French folks most famous for their cover of Neil Young's "Only Love Can Break Your Heart."

Now I'm not about to call CDNow a bastion of rock criticism, but this should be the kind of stuff that I dig. They're fey, they're foreign. This'll be great, right?

Wrong. Saint Etienne have managed throughout their 10-year career to take the worst things about a bunch of great bands and claim them as their own. Stereolab's occasionally plodding '60s sound? Check. How about Primal Scream's intermittent overproduction, with that "the samples will save us" attitude towards music? Got that too. How about a general sense of weak melodies, tired lyrics and dearth of innovation? Got that in spades.

Now there's nothing offensive about anything Saint Etienne's catalogue, but that is just the problem. While songs like "Jack Lemmon" and "Saturday" are designed to go down like a spoonful of syrup, ingest too much of this stuff and you're bound to get mighty nauseous.

Given the fact that this is actually a soundtrack to a film ("The Misadventures Of Margaret"), you might be tempted to cut them some slack, maybe this is what the director wanted. However, there's really nothing about the rest of their discography that's much more appealing than the 20 songs presented here. Even the disc's high point, the sweetly (how many more ways can I say wussy nicely?) enticing "Find Me A Boy," upon further inspection, turned out to be a cover.

Great. The only two Saint Etienne songs I like aren't even theirs. If I were Björk, I'd sue CDNow for libel.

DEVON REED |