REVIEW: Sarah Cracknell, Lipslide (Instinct)
- Wilson Neate
Since joining Saint Etienne in 1991 and adding a crucial ingredient to the sound of a band who surely rank among the more influential British acts of the last decade, Sarah Cracknell has emerged as one of the most enduring and classy female vocalists in UK pop today.
While too much of the mid-90s was taken up with Brit-Pop hype and while Blur and Oasis fought it out in the not entirely dissimilar English tabloid and music presses, Cracknell's full-time outfit quietly went about their business crafting their own, more sophisticated, more intelligently referential and infinitely more danceable soundtrack to a post-house, nascent Cool Britannia. Indeed, Saint Etienne not only pre-dated Brit-Pop - enjoying the dubious honor of having Oasis open for them on one tour - but they will undoubtedly outlive it.
When bandmates Pete Wiggs and Bob Stanley took time out in 1996 to set up their own label, Cracknell took the opportunity to record her solo debut Lipslide (which came out in Britain in 1997, albeit with slightly different tracks). As Cracknell commented in an interview in the English press, this project was in part motivated by being tired of "people assuming that I was just a frontperson for Bob and Pete, that I was a puppet, that I didn't do any of the real work."
Bearing in mind her songwriting abilities as evidenced on Saint Etienne's 1994 Tiger Bay ("Hug My Soul" and "Marble Lions"), even by the time of its original release Lipslide was already long-overdue. Given the quality of her work thus far with Wiggs and Stanley, it's not surprising that Cracknell's solo release should be such a successful outing.
Lipslide covers both well-trodden and uncharted territory. On the one hand Cracknell offers solid and smooth, polished pop in the Saint Etienne vein, albeit without the ironic, sometimes rough-edged, off-beat or experimental dimension of the trio at their best - there are no Rush samples here, no occasional dub dabblings and no sampled movie and television snippets. On the other hand, she makes a convincing case for her own, autonomous musical identity both as a co-writer of all the songs and as the producer on two of the most impressive tracks on the album.
Sarah Cracknell achieves a finely tuned musical collage that effortlessly straddles the dance floor and the cold light of day with its attendant ups and downs, usually on the barometer of romance. Lipslide's cocktail of dance grooves and melodic, playful pop blends clubby exuberance and morning-after melancholy.
The more upbeat side of the equation is well represented by tracks such as "Desert Baby," "If You Leave Me," "Anymore," and "Coastal Town," with their driving Euro-disco beats. At the same time, songs like "4 Months 2 Weeks," "Home" and "Goldie" attest to the more introspective, comfortably mournful side of Cracknell's vision. The melancholy melodies are complemented by Cracknell's wistful vocals which, in turn, foreground the mood of lyrics that frame eloquent snapshots of unremarkable, everyday emotional states. While her songs often comprise familiarly banal and mundane dramas of expectation, remorse, loss and longing, Cracknell renders them with an uncommonly evocative touch. Like Morrissey without the irony or the whingeing, or like a less beat-laden version of recent Everything But the Girl, Cracknell shows that there is life beyond the dance floor - it may not provide fun or even particularly colorful raw material but, in the right hands and given the right vocal treatment, it can still make for great songs.
The defining aspect of this record is perhaps Cracknell's ability to craft music that manages to be simultaneously retro and now, moving in and out of styles and bridging epochs without missing a beat. Like her work with Saint Etienne, Lipslide reflects an updated 60s pop-art sensibility that recycles and recontextualizes forms, cheerfully constructs clever pastiches and nods to a past generation of musical coordinates at the same time as it taps into the current dance sounds that have permeated the best pop music of the last few years.
Where Cracknell differs is that her musical collage is shorn of pop art's camp and irony that Saint Etienne left largely intact on albums like Foxbase Alpha and So Tough (on which you could occasionally almost hear Wiggs and Stanley winking at you as they slipped in another clever reference).
On Lipslide Cracknell takes the opportunity to declare her musical influences more openly and sincerely than before, not simply by reference but by carefully fashioning songs that turn citation into a sustained stylistic recreation of the feel of the originals. Not surprisingly, her coordinates are well-rooted in the 60s - Françoise Hardy, Burt Bacharach, Joao Gilberto, and Dusty Springfield. Particularly outstanding are the songs that invoke the music of the latter two.
"Oh Boy, the Feeling When You Held My Hand," on which Cracknell is accompanied only by guitar, recreates the understated and yet melodically memorable bossa nova stylings of Gilberto. "Ready or Not" and "Can't Stop Now" - both of which Cracknell produced - are standout affairs that rediscover a particularly 60s British pop sound and pay loving homage to Dame Dusty, all the while managing, as the cliche goes, to be . . . well . . . timeless. The second of the two, a lilting, waltzy minor masterpiece with strings, harmonies and piano, is the real winner here.
While "Ready or Not" and "Can't Stop Now" in particular attest to a finely honed retro sensibility, Cracknell's variations on 60s pop go beyond imitation or faddish interest to reinvent her sources in a contemporary context. But then Sarah Cracknell has a peculiar link to that period with which she continues such a productive flirtation. In 1967 - owing to the fact that her father was a first assistant director to Stanley Kubrick - a newly born Cracknell was screen tested for the part of the Star Child in 2001: A Space Odyssey. Kubrick decided he wanted a stranger image and she didn't get the part. But that close-call perhaps suggests how, from the outset, Cracknell has always had one foot squarely in the middle of 60s pop culture, the other stepping toward the future.
Although some have criticized Lipslide's lack of depth, bemoaned its saccharine quality and even faulted it for being as weightless as the backing music for 60s/70s British shampoo commercials, they really seemed to have completely missed the point - this is pop after all, and beautifully done at that.
