Saint Etienne - I've Been Trying To Tell You [CD+DVD]

Saint Etienne have always understood that pop music is the nearest thing we have to time travel, the closest we can get to breathing the air of a different time. On this album, they take that theory to it's logical conclusion. I've Been Trying To Tell You uses sounds and samples from 1997-2001, evoking the folk memory of the period by using and twisting recordings from the time, re-working them into new songs. For the first time, Saint Etienne didn't record together in a studio. The album was completed remotely, in Hove (Pete), Oxford (Sarah) and Bradford (Bob, in collaboration with film and TV composer Gus Bousfield, who contributes to a number of tracks). An accompanying film by Alasdair McLellan is a slow-motion travelogue that takes in "a lifetime's worth" of locations. The dreamlike mood of the album, and the film, is a statement in itself: namely that memory is a largely fictionalized product of the human mind, rather than a reliable record.