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  • Record Label:
  • Release Date:
Sound of Water Image
Metascore
80

Generally favorable reviews - based on 14 Critic Reviews What's this?

User Score
7.2

Generally favorable reviews- based on 5 Ratings

Score distribution:
  1. Positive: 13 out of 14
  2. Negative: 0 out of 14
  1. Magnet
    100
    Saint Etienne's latest album is masterful: fanatically detailed, intelligent and swimming in lovely melodies and delicious electronic bleeps... easily one of the year's standout albums. [#46, p.90]
  2. They've made a dreamy set suffused with synth bleeps and strings, nodding to Eno, Abba, and U.K. electro-soul peers Everything but the Girl.
  3. 80
    There's still a warm heart beating under all this newly-assembled machinery.
  4. 80
    But unlike the band's overbearing forays into trip-hop and dub before, a new level of soul and texture emerge from Saint Etienne's neo-modernist stylings.
  5. There are moments of pop pleasure here, surrounded by spare, languid electronica sections, vaguely reminiscent of the High Llamas.
  6. Spin
    80
    Every twinkling ambient moment is remarkably humane.
  7. Saint Etienne has made an egregiously Cardigans-esque wrong turn, abandoning impeccable craft and Motown melodies for the breezy if aimless experimentation of its wildly uneven EPs.

See all 14 Critic Reviews

Score distribution:
  1. Positive: 2 out of 2
  2. Mixed: 0 out of 2
  3. Negative: 0 out of 2
  1. johnj
    Jul 21, 2007
    10
    What a gorgeous and sophisticated pop album. Saint Etienne's best album, by far.
  2. robd
    Mar 18, 2005
    8
    Very good. Their most sonically adventurous effort since So tough, although it reuires more attention. One of their best.

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