33 rebellions per minute
© 1997 bokonin@hotmail.com
1991
Saint Etienne, FOXBASE ALPHA
The keyword here is "languid". Which is odd, because nominally this is dance music, electronic enough and rhythmic enough and with the mandatory female singer; "Only Love Can Break Your Heart", with especially bouncy chorded piano and a synth-clarinet hook, was a club hit. ALPHA even sounds, casually, as if any schnook with a sequencer and a drum machine could've made it, although said schnook would need a strong attention-to-detail streak. But this is a record based on layers of loops, most purely exemplified on "Stoned To Say The Least", which starts with a single woozy 5-note bass loop that hardly seems to fit any defined meter at all, until the first drum layer enters and reminds you that any pattern length, no matter how many decimal places you'd need to measure it to, can be neatly divided by 8, and every succeeding loop, entering individually, draws the rhythmic chains ever tighter. "Wilson" loops sampled vocals in a rare counterrhythm to the main bed, while "She's The One" has a chorus sampling some soul man singing "In this world of ups and downs" repeatedly as the bass (seemingly a keyboard set on "bass purr"), guitar, and loudening drums enter in sequence.
Although I'm sure I unconsciously stole the notion of "rhythmic bed" from some other random context, it fits: the multiple pulsating lines each song builds up--- fake drums and shimmery keys and lots of real piano, soft and pretty and consonant--- feel more like an enveloping rockabye, and even the unsettling "Like The Swallow" promotes a feel like "maybe I should run for my life, but I'd have to get up first". Sarah Cracknell, who does the real singing (her not being looped doesn't prevent her from repeating lines), has a nice voice, something like Liz Phair's delivery and marginal huskiness crossed with Dolores O'Riordan (Cranberries)'s grace and elegance and tone color but none of her affectations (and with exact pitch). She has, too, the kind of voice which many men describe as "sexy" and many others describe as "bored"; I've never been sure if that's a disagreement over the voice itself or over conceptions of sex. At any rate, she too is languid.
Why I respond so favorably to this record, I think, is its pacing. Every song has a strong underlying groove, and most of the sonic layers at each point will be cycling steadily, thus giving every detail the chance to insinuate itself into my brain, yet almost every single measure is just a bit different from the one before, and ponder for a moment how rare, in a repetition-based form like dance (or pop or classical), that is. I love ALPHA's sense of continuous channeled flow, where no second is being wasted. I also personally think Bob Stanley and Pete Wiggs (the songwriters/ producers) showed consistent excellent judgement about what new sound or new note or shifted beat would work in each context. Some people prefer Etienne's later albums, which play prettiness up, motion down, and radically shrink the number of layers; I find those numbingly repetitive to the point of unlistenable. As for your tastes, you know them better than I do.
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