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11 Feb 22 | Re: The greatest ever album closing track | Link-U-Post

The best thing going today on Twitter is the People's Pop Polls, and this month they're voting on the best album closing tracks of all time. I've nominated Finisterre by Saint Etienne (from the album Finisterre) so here are some notes on why.

The song has a pretty tough job to do, placed at the end of a very varied album that lurches from dance-pop bangers to electro experiments to songwriterly sketches to pretty instrumentals. To tie that loose collection together, Finisterre looks the listener in the eye and discusses some of the themes that have been implied along the way, including hope, optimism, beauty, and a disappointment at anything that lacks those qualities. But a disappointment that's also a cause for joy, since it's an affirmation that we're still looking for the good.

So it's a manifesto song. Except that the manifesto is voiced by someone outside the band (one Sarah Churchill), so there's a distance. It's not clear whether the band subscribes to the manifesto as stated, or whether they're more interested in the aesthetic quality of what it is to hold those kinds of ideas. We are talking a sweeping, impractical idealism that can write off the entire nineteenth century, that wants skyscrapers without the industrialisation that made them possible. That rushes to plant its flag wherever it finds beauty, deliberately neglecting to think things all the way through. It's a young adult's way of thinking: flawed, but with a nostalgic appeal for those of us who've had to move past it (and in delegating the vocal, the band imply that they themselves might be getting too old to embrace that mode of thinking completely). It's ever so dreamy, but it's not weak, since it takes some courage to have that kind of hope.

These big ideas are put into the most epic setting possible by having the song quietly be about the end of the world (hence "Finisterre"). Plenty of albums close with an apocalyptic climax, but Finisterre takes a non-Rock approach, being more interested in the two people who crawl out of the tree after Ragnarok and find a blank canvas where they can create a new world. It's a daydream about what it would mean to have that opportunity - or do we, in a very real sense, have that chance within ourselves every day? It's there in the music too - the nervy electro of the spoken bits giving way to chiming prettiness, especially when the other Sarah's vocal finally comes in.

Finally, a word about the song's place in the band's career. Since Finisterre they've only made concept albums, released increasingly far apart, always well received by the fan base (and music writers) but hopelessly far from what Radio 1 are looking for. Finisterre was their last album as a vaguely current act, as a would-be chart concern, so this track is the end of their first act as well as the end of an album (and of the world). Any triumphalism would have been misplaced, but there is a quiet pride at having hung on to their outlook. And it's not a complete full stop: the opening lyrics call forward to what would be their next single a few years later (Side Streets). Thematically it's as good a summation of the band as you could find: nothing to do with London, really, which music writers constantly bang on about, but celebrating a state of mind that's available to everyone, everywhere. You don't have to agree with everything in the lyric, but if a part of you doesn't want to agree with it, to be on that team, then Saint Etienne probably aren't for you. If they are for you, then hopefully you're like me, completely floored by this brilliant song, thrilled and filled with hope for humanity but sad that you can't be more optimistic at the same time.

So vote for bravery, hope, nostalgia for our old mistakes, and new beginnings. Vote Finisterre.

Posted by LA MAGA at 22:17

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