Pop Music Can Be So Good. But We Make It All So Rubbishy..... Words and Music by Sa

...to paraphrase a spoken word segue from the band's Finisterre album. And as a species we do....violently and without shame (most often on a Saturday evening....). Yet not fatally or irreparably. Not when there are bands like Saint Etienne acting as keepers of the flame.

Saint Etienne have always been about music - not just in that obvious way you think just because they're a band and that, but because they are inhabited by music, that which they grew up with and which has left not only a mark on their work but on their lives too. With their 8th studio album, they have not only created their best and most consistent work since So Tough, but have woven a rich celebration and joyful appreciation of what this music has meant to them.

Not only do they have a fantastic road map cover featuring various musical landmarks (Penny Lane, Paisley Park, Devil Gate Drive, Sproston Green, Montague Terrace....), AND the tracks listed on the front like they should be on a great album , but they then go on to deliver 13 songs of euphoric, rapturous, melodic, smart, heartfelt, giddy music that is perfectly at once classic and contemporary. This is 40 somethings making disco music - it shouldn't work but the fact that it does further determines the band as true pioneers, worthy pilgrims, and just truckloads better at pop music than anyone under thirty (or managed by someone over 50).

Over The Border is a poem/paean to the whole overarching concept, the story of the use of "Top Of The Pops as my world atlas", of "memorising the charts.....Tuesday lunchtime at 12.45....Smash Hits, Paul Morley in the NME......Mute, Y, Zoo, Factory....", of the mixture of entering an adult world on the crest of this fantastic musical wave, and of celebrating that if you're lucky, it never actually completely leaves you. I'm going to go the whole curmudgeonly old bastard way now and state as a matter of fact that I don't see a 40 something One Direction making a concept album about how great Little Mix and Gareth Gates were.....

There are dancefloor fillers, big beating stompers, Italian house piano-fied groovers, laid back white soul croons, disco-flecked pop classics, as well as the usual calmer, more introspective and serene moments (such as I Threw It All Away which incongruously melds folky flutes to a riff redolent of Japan's Nightporter). It all ends with Haunted Jukebox, bookending the nostalgia fest with an elegant (slight) comedown......"and when the record's over, just tell me what its all about". There's still more to learn, more to find out. If you think you know what the best record in the world ever is.....you're a statue, trapped in your own past, not celebrating it. Words & Music....celebrates, enjoys, and carries on the enduring belief in the transcendence and escapism of music. Of how we can be bigger and better than we are.

I'm over 40 by the way........