I've Been Trying To Tell You, Saint Etienne, CD

Saint Etienne have always understood that pop music is the nearest thing we have to time travel, the closest we can get to breathing the air of a different time. On this album, they take that theory to it's logical conclusion. I've Been Trying To Tell You uses sounds and samples from 1997-2001, evoking the folk memory of the period by using and twisting recordings from the time, re-working them into new songs. For the first time, Saint Etienne didn't record together in a studio. The album was completed remotely, in Hove (Pete), Oxford (Sarah) and Bradford (Bob, in collaboration with film and TV composer Gus Bousfield, who contributes to a number of tracks). An accompanying film by Alasdair McLellan is a slow-motion travelogue that takes in "a lifetime's worth" of locations. The dreamlike mood of the album, and the film, is a statement in itself: namely that memory is a largely fictionalized product of the human mind, rather than a reliable record.