Cast your outtakes to the wind
Saint Etienne — Schroeder
(from the CD I Love To Paint, Heavenly Records 1995)
As I type this, it’s really only been raining in Boston for not quite 48 hours, but it kinda feels like it’s been raining since, like, March. On the up side, it does mean the idiot students in our neighborhood weren’t screaming and vomiting on the street in front of our house, so that’s a plus. But it does lend itself to a slightly melancholy form of languor, which makes a nice mellow Saint Etienne instrumental feel appropriate. This is taken from the 1995 fan club release I Love To Paint: since only Guided By Voices and Stereolab were more wildly productive in the ’90s than Saint Etienne, the trio not only released a ton of non-LP singles and EPs, but they also kept up a fairly steady stream of lower-profile collections like this one, which contains outtakes and oddities from their first four or five years. As the liner notes point out, this is basically one of their earlier songs (”Highgate Road Incident,” the b-side of “Pale Movie” from 1994’s Tiger Bay) reworked into an homage to Vince Guaraldi’s Peanuts scores. Given my love of both Vince Guaraldi and Peanuts, I wholeheartedly approve.
–Stewart Mason
