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Saint Etienne take us gently by the hand, to sink deep down through the layers of the after-hours and pull tired minds back from the brink of despair. With The Night all anxieties abate, the wickedness of a quickening mind is slowed to a soft-focus smear, and everything takes on a lofty and agreeable appeal of utter tranquillity.
The Night belongs to a long tradition that begins in the pre-times with one man finding solace in the sound of the wind in the grass or water running over rock, then strolls on through centuries of softening sounds, passing through collage and the music of the new age.
It takes in contemporary somnambulist masterpieces such as Virginia Astley’s From Gardens Where We Feel Secure, the KLF’s Chill Out and Talk Talk’s Spirit of Eden. Its architecture is ambient, its lighting low, its surfaces gleaming with infinite possibility. All nocturnal life is to be found here, but though in the basement of the night the dimensions are different. Words take on new meaning, shadows lean ever longer and a lone fox pauses beneath a solitary streetlight on a nameless street, something snatched and held between its beautiful, bladed teeth. Out here anything is possible.
Hectic times breed hectic minds but here there is no such thing as a lonely hour, just the many laminated layers of The Night and all the soothing secrets that lie within.
So easy does it. Slip on in. And breathe.
Tracklist
Side A
1 Settle In
2 Half Light
3 Through The Glass
4 Nightingale
5 Northern Counties East
6 Ellar Carr
7 When You Were Young
Side B
1 No Rush
2 Gold
3 Celestial
4 Preflyte
5 Wonderlight
6 Hear My Heart
7 Alone Together