The following is a Designated Cheerleader piece by @jays_ear for the Best Album of 1991 tournament. I hope you enjoy it, and I hope you follow the link to vote in the tournament. Thanks!
Every once in a while, you come across an album and you listen to it and you think, holy shit, they made this just for me!
The thing is I don’t really love straight up dance music. I like it in small doses but to my ear it often gets a bit monotonous after a while. Similarly for sweet, borderline-treacly pop—I like it, but within reason. But put that sweet-nonsense 60s pop on top of some clubby 90s dance beats and it turns out to be a revelation. Add tracks built around looped samples of cultural detritus and you have an album I might just have custom ordered.
If you want to talk about Foxbase Alpha, you probably want to talk about the those three singles. But I want to talk about "Wilson." My partner finds "Wilson" to be the most annoying song she’s ever heard. For me, the fact that they put this odd lark (by way of explanation, this is a < 2 min “song” where snippets of nonsense dialogue are looped over a syncopated beat slowed down to a crawl)—that they put this odd and to most people kinda annoying lark right after a strangely affecting cover of Neil Young’s "Only Love Can Break Your Heart" defines the album and accounts for why I love it so much. It speaks to a very particular kind of sensibility, I guess.
The whole album is like that. A 7-minute downtempo electronic track followed by a burst of absolutely perfect pop followed by snippets of a forgotten TV show (I have no idea if it’s actually a TV show in any given instance.)
Anyway, I mentioned the three songs—if you don’t want to listen to the whole album, this is what you probably want to listen to: (1) the Neil Young cover I mentioned above—it’s very good; (2) a cover of Field Mice’s "Kiss and Make Up," which is where the album comes closest to slipping over into treacle but still manages to sound convincing; (3) the absolute gem of the album: "Nothing Can Stop Us," the song that most perfectly embodies the band’s aesthetic—like Berry Gordy or Phil Spector filtered through the early 90s British club scene.
Perhaps I should mention that this is a very self-aware album. Started by Bob Stanley (a music critic/journalist) and Pete Wiggs, Saint Etienne is a band steeped in the history of pop and not afraid to wear its influences openly. Sarah Cracknell’s vocals sound straight out of 1965. This is their first album and part of its charm is that it plays like a deliberate experiment that comes off brilliantly. (Conceptually, you could think of the “Only Love Can Break Your Heart” cover as a Nouvelle Vague-type track, just a decade too early.)
