After 35 years as a successful pop trio, Saint Etienne – Sarah Cracknell, Bob Stanley and Pete Wiggs – are finally calling time on their career as a group.
International is the last of their thirteen studio albums, and also the most collaborative, with spots for Tom Rowlands of The Chemical Brothers, Confidence Man, Vince Clarke, Paul Hartnoll, and – strikingly – Nick Heyward.
What’s the music like?
Late summer is the perfect time to be releasing an album like this. Perhaps inevitably there is a rich element of nostalgia, but there is no sitting on laurels or wallowing in sadness – though it has to be said the final few tracks leave a tear in the eye.
Rather, it is more of the same – slightly arty pop but with really rewarding diversions in league with the guests. The breezy Brand New Me, with Confidence Man, is a treat, Cracknell at her most winsome in the vocal. Glad is of a similar vintage, pointing towards the club in Tom Rowlands’ production. Already at the venue are Paul Hartnoll and Vince Clarke, with the former’s work on Take Me To The Pilot creating visions of a 1990s basement. Clarke’s work on Two Lovers is more reflective, but again ideally suited to Cracknell’s versatile voice, which has many more tones than we often give it credit for.
The Nick Heyward collaboration Gobetweens is a lyrical and musical treat, rhyming ‘Letraset’ with ‘internet’ to emphasise the contrast between the late 1980s of the band’s forming and the technology now. Facebook also falls under the microscope, a subtly dismissive take in the closing The Last Time. This is where everything comes to a head and a tear comes to the eye, Saint Etienne’s final statement leaving us all a bit emotional.
Does it all work?
It does – for one last time. This is a winsome collection, the band playing to their strengths, and clearly having fun right up to the end.
Is it recommended?
It is essential for Saint Etienne devotees to have the band’s final album as a keepsake; all the more so when it is revealed to be an ideal summing up of their achievements. Equal parts tenderness and attitude, it does exactly what they promised, delivering bittersweet pop winners that cover nostalgia and the future with panache. A wholly appropriate signing-off.
For fans of… Goldfrapp, Happy Mondays, The Cardigans, Divine Comedy
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Published post no.2,666 – Tuesday 23 September 2025
Richard Strauss Eine Alpensinfonie Op.64 (1911-15)
Colorado MahlerFest 195269359249 [49’47”] Producer Jonathan Galle Engineer Tim Burton Live performance at Macky Auditorium, Boulder, Colorado, 18 May 2024
Reviewed by Richard Whitehouse
What’s the story?
With its underlying concept that of Mahler and the Mountains, this 37th edition of Colorado MahlerFest was probably the most ambitious yet. As was reflected in those works featured at its main orchestral concerts, and not least this performance of Richard Strauss’s An Alpine Symphony.
What’s the music like?
This being its composer’s final large-scale orchestral piece is not fortuitous, as it concludes a sequence of symphonic works stretching back some 35 years to his Symphony in D minor. Strauss may subsequently have abandoned the symphony for the tone poem, but these latter became increasingly symphonic in formal scope or expressive density with the present work bringing full circle a process as could hardly be resumed given the tonal retrenchment of his idiom henceforth. An Alpine Symphony represents an impressive and a defining culmination.
Although it nominally outlines a day’s ascent then descent in the Bavarian Alps (actually the Heimgarten), this work is equally the ‘journey of a life’ duly articulated through an extended sonata-form design. It is this latter aspect which emerges at the forefront of Kenneth Woods’ interpretation – one which unfolds cohesively and, most important of all, organically out of then back to its evoking of Night. The crescendo of activity through to Sunrise then The Ascent is keenly maintained, with those expository episodes that follow not lacking scenic immediacy or formal impetus. Neither is the ensuing developmental sequence underplayed on route to the emotional crux of On the Summit then Vision: music, it might be added, whose grandiloquent expression is shot through with a knowledge of its imminent demise.
What goes up must inevitably come down: the transition into the reprise is finely handled in terms of its encroaching Elegy, though momentum does falter slightly in the recapitulatory phase of Storm and Descent. Not that the Colorado MahlerFest Orchestra is found wanting as regards its commitment; more likely, the clear if somewhat confined acoustic of Boulder’s Macky Auditorium is not able to encompass the sheer volume of sound effected in this phase. Woods nevertheless heads into Sunset with requisite poise and if the coda that is Ausklang – a term more or less untranslatable but which approximates to ‘catharsis’ – is just a little too passive, its rapt recollections of Wagner and Mahler are eloquently inferred. As is the return to Night, audibly linking into that from the opening for what becomes an indissoluble unity.
Does it all work?
Pretty much throughout. Once a piece reserved for special occasions, An Alpine Symphony is now among the most often recorded of Strauss’s orchestral works but while this performance cedes to others in terms of tonal opulence and visceral impact, it has relatively few peers as regards its symphonic credentials. A pity, incidentally, the performance of Schubert’s Death and the Maiden quartet from the first half, which Woods has elaborated from Mahler’s often sketchy arrangement for strings, could not have been included as to make this a two-disc set.
Is it recommended?
It is. The CD comes with a full listing of personnel on its rear inlay, and you can scan the QR code or click here for Kelly Dean Hansen’s detailed notes. Mahler’s Fourth Symphony from this edition will be issued separately.
Listen / Buy
For further purchase options, visit the MahlerFest website – and for more information on the festival itself, click here. Click on the name for further information on conductor Kenneth Woods
Published post no.2,665 – Monday 22 September 2025
Kenneth Woods issues the debut of his band The Old Blue Gang, less a concept album per se than themed reflections on a shameful while all too typical incident (then as now) of migrant workers who were first exploited then betrayed in the American West of some 150 years ago.
What’s the music like?
Best known as a conductor, notably at the helm of the English Symphony Orchestra for over a decade, Kenneth Woods also works extensively as cellist and guitarist. This latter career is showcased in Silent Spike, the first album with his band The Old Blue Gang, which affords a probing take on the largely forgotten role of Chinese immigrants involved in constructing the Transcontinental Railway line from California via Oregon to Washington. A tale of alienation, exploitation and ostracization which has lost none of its horrific impact over ensuing decades.
Opening track The Voyage emerges ‘Déjà Vu’-like into focus, its commentary about those coming to the New World with little or no expectation delivered in suitably deadpan fashion by Woods, whose searing guitar affords contrast with Joe Hoskin’s methodical yet ominous bass and Steve Roberts’s forceful yet flexible drumming. The arduous workload endured by the immigrants is vividly conveyed by the grunge-inflected Steel Stretcher, before Dead Line Creek puts musicians (and listeners) through their collective paces with its unsparing depiction of mass murder by the gang fronted by Old Blue – an outlaw whose reward is as much destructive as monetary. Much the longest track at 21 minutes and its evolution more instrumentally than narratively driven, this is alt-Americana at its most uncompromising.
It might have been preferable to sequence this epic after the next three tracks, each of them streamed as singles in advance of the album. Sundown Town evokes its intolerance with a fatalism redolent of Johnny Cash, intensified by Lilly White with its chilling recollection of miners being deliberately incarcerated so they need not be paid. Ride the Rails provides a natural continuation with its tale of the immigrants being driven out of town by the under-employed during economic depression, who were (inevitably) acquitted of any wrongdoing. It remains for closing track Gather the Ghosts and Bones to inject a degree of empathy as it recounts the returning of remains of those who received burial in their native China – people otherwise known only through the handful of faded photographs that have come down to us.
Does it all work?
Indeed. Ensemble is unusually dense and layered for a three-piece outfit, though this does not mean excessive ‘noodling’ or wanton virtuosity; the playing being characterized by a restraint or even austerity such as fittingly underlines the grimness of the narrative and the austerity of its realization. Pertinent comparison, conceptually if not musically, can be made with Fairport Convention’s 1971 masterpiece ‘Babbacombe’ Lee – for all that this album touches, however obliquely, upon a redemptive quality understandably absent from what is encapsulated here.
Is it recommended?
Very much so. It hardly makes for comfortable listening, but Silent Spike is a plangent while resourceful treatment of a subject whose contemporary relevance cannot be gainsaid. It also offers intriguing pointers as to where The Old Blue Gang might be headed on future albums.
The Utopia Strong (Steve Davis, Kavus Torabi and Mike York) have shared a new track, the latest to be taken from their forthcoming album, Doperider out via Rocket Recordings on 10 October 2025.
You can listen to their new release, The Atavist, below. It is a wonderfully atmospheric piece, a cloud of synthesized sound with a passing similarity (in a good way!) to Mark Snow’s music for The X-Files:
The life of a psychonaut can take one to many plateaus of reality. Opinions vary as regards which of these are either desirable or optimal. All things considered though, it’s fair to say that once the average cerebral wanderer finds themselves a stoned skeleton on a motorbike, it’s a sign that they’re going places.
Such were the movements of The Utopia Strong, in making their third and arguably trippiest full-length album for Rocket Recordings. As the band explain: “When recording we tend to have books, bits of art and interesting things lying around the place. (Kavus) had recently bought the Paul Kirchner compendium, Awaiting The Collapse. Paul’s character Dope Rider (the skeleton in question) drives around the desert, getting into all manner of high jinx and spouting cosmic philosophy, highlighting the absurdities of life, death and the American mythos. “When we had created that particular track, one of our most beautiful and outré, it seemed to name itself. Certainly, we were looking at the comic strips while listening to it and something about its wide-screen vibes and the beautiful desert seemed to marry together.”
Serendipity has always played a strong role in The Utopia Strong, with the improvisatory approach of Steve Davis, Kavus Torabi and Mike York – as well as the innate chemistry between the trio – allowing them to take extensions through dimensions that frequently end up as much of a surprise to the band as the listener.
The band has summarily found ways to evolve its approach to facilitate the most adventurous exploratory missions possible. In this realm, the band’s formidable history – Steve as a snooker champion and bona fide household name, Kavus as a psychedelic and progressive polymath in the like of Gong, Cardiacs et al, and Mike in his work with Coil, Current 93 and as one of the UK’s foremost bagpipe makers – is transcended and usurped by their combined psychic chemistry.
Yet more than anything else this remains an evolutionary process. “All the pieces on Doperider began as purely electronic pieces, with Mike and Steve on modular synths and Kavus on an analogue synth” the band relate. “We were deliberately trying to not repeat ourselves and, for this reason, made a point of changing the model a little. Not that we’ve ever been necessarily conventional but I think this album goes a little deeper than the previous two studio albums.”
Doperider does indeed take the band down a variety of auditory pathways previously unexplored, and further into the realms of more surrealistic visions akin to the systems-built bliss of Caterina Barbieri, the unforgiving noisescapes of Hiro Kone or the alien soundtracks of latter-day Laurie Spiegel. “Certainly, Steve’s listening habits have changed somewhat since the first album, he has gone deeper into abstract electronica and musique concrete as well as becoming increasingly adept with his modular set up. This seems to have formed a backbone to how the music developed” reflects Kavus.
Hence the coruscating intensity of the title track and the elegiac rapture of ‘Unity Of Light’ showcase a still more moving and melancholic approach to their art, alongside the blissful ‘Harpies’, which features the vocals of Katharine Blake (Miranda Sex Garden/Mediaeval Baebes). Elsewhere curveballs strike such as the strident and stentorian curtain-raiser ‘Prophecy’, which utilises the influence of Magma and Zeuhl music – a longstanding passion for all three members – for the first time in earnest. “It sits better at the start of the album as otherwise it would disrupt the decent into the beautiful hell hole that unfolds” as Steve notes.
Essentially however, the mission of The Utopia Strong remains intact – to offer a transformative pathway to wonders anew. “Well, we are making psychedelic music or, if you will, head music” reflects Kavus. “We put an awful lot of detail into each piece. It’s certainly not minimalist. Often after our shows people will remark that we had made them feel like they were on drugs. That’s the idea really. We’ll take you on a voyage of self-discovery that won’t preclude showing up to work on time the next day. Although really the core message of our music is ‘Quit your job and start a commune.”
As Steve notes: “Hopefully we’ve done justice to the comic book character Dope Rider and that he’d have loved riding along on his Harley Davison on another quest, with the wind blowing through his rib cage, listening to this album. If the audience choose the psychonaut road, then we are delighted to have been of service.”
Doperider is out on vinyl, CD and digitally on 10 October 2025.
Published post no.2,660 – Wednesday 17 September 2025
Warrington-Runcorn New Town Development Plan – the one-man retro-futurist electronic project of Gordon Chapman-Fox – has announced his sixth album, Public Works and Utilities. It will be released via the Castles In Space label on October 10, alongside a new compilation, titled Appendix I, which rounds up the tracks from three Warrington-Runcorn EPs on one handy CD.
Public Works and Utilities is the sixth Warrington-Runcorn New Town Development Plan album in less than five years and continues to explore new towns and the demise of the post-war consensus. This time, Gordon’s gaze falls on our public services that have been starved of cash or privatised since 1980.
“It seems ridiculous in hindsight for a developed country to have packed up and sold off vital infrastructure such as power, water or the rail network,” he says. “Forty years down the line, and all of these vital industries are barely functional. Their prime function now is to drain cash from our pockets and into the bulging wallets of shareholders.”
This anger continues to power Gordon’s desire to make Warrington-Runcorn a statement for the here and now, with the themes more relevant than ever, rather than an exercise in rose-tinted nostalgia. As the epic, 18-minute album closer will attest, ‘The People Matter’.
“This album very much came from my live shows,” says Gordon. “A lot of these tracks were designed to be performed live, and you will have heard quite a few of them if you’ve seen me live in the last year.”
As a result, there is a certain rawness, not to mention an almost upbeat danceable quality. The atmosphere of the previous albums has become fused with an urge to get you to move your feet.
The full tracklisting of Public Works and Utilities is:
1. Swift Safe And Comfortable
2. Sunset Over Stanlow
3. 800 Yards Down At Ince Six Feet
4. Water Treatment Works
5. Renewal And Regeneration
6. The People Matter
Released on the same day as the new album, the compilation Appendix I brings together three Warrington-Runcorn EPs onto CD for the first time, bringing together some of the more esoteric elements of the world of musical new town planning.
Building A New Town from 2023 moved the reference point of Warrington-Runcorn back from the synth-drenched late-’70s to the more post-psychedelic, folk infused world of Mike Oldfield and Pentangle. The four tracks are guitar-led, but retain Gordon’s mix of optimism and sinister atmosphere.
The next EP, A Shared Sense Of Purpose was the lead single from last year’s Your Community Hub album, and released in both 7” and 12” versions. This CD takes the single edit from the 7”, and adds the bonus tracks from the 12” – including a remix from the legendary Vince Clarke, and a another guitar-led folk remix of the title track.
Lastly, Overspill Estates adds four songs taken from the sessions for Your Community Hub that didn’t make it onto the final album.
Listen to Appendix I
The full tracklisting of Appendix I is:
1. A Fresh Dawn For North Cheshire
2. The View From Halton Castle
3. Solid Foundations
4. The Cornerstone
5. A Shared Sense Of Purpose (Single Edit)
6. A Shared Sense Of Purpose (Vince Clarke remix)
7. Oakwood
8. A Shared Sense Of Purpose (1973 version)
9. The People Of The Town
10. All Mod Cons
11. Open Green Spaces
12. All You Need In Five Minutes Brisk Walk
Published post no.2,655 – Friday 12 September 2025
Arcana.fm 