The Saint enlists the services of the English rapper Wildflower on the track "Soft Like Me", a paean to the positive powers of femininity with a sunny, bouncy chorus that you can almost imagine Karen Carpenter singing. The genius of this song is how it places praise for the qualities of emotional openness and tenderness in the context of rap — an American genre noted for brutish masculinity and misogyny. I would use the word "subvert" here, but I've been informed that only licensed Academics can use it without irony.

"Stop and Think It Over" is a ballad that would, in most hands, turn irredeemably syrupy; the regret in Cracknell's breathy voice and the musically unresolved ending keeps the track from toppling over entirely into mush.

"Shower Scene" is another house (that is the right word to use, right?) anthem with utterly obtuse lyrical content ("in the rain/in the fall/in the mud/in the hall/in the rain/in the fog/in the shice/call my name" are pretty much all the lyrics of the four-and-a-half-minute song); interpretation of what that actually means is fairly open.

Like all clever pop bands, Saint Etienne has often been accused of being too self-referential; they do nothing to refute this charge on Finisterre. The track "The Way We Live Now" is clearly a reference to "The Way We Used To Live", a nine-minute single off of Sound of Water; the band name-checks one of their own songs in "B92," a satiric take on the music industry.

The one thing from previous Saint Etienne albums that rabid fans might miss is the constant sense of Ameriphilia; there are, as far as I can tell, virtually no explicitly American references on the album (which is rather unusual for a band that has produced songs titled "Erica America", "The Boy Scouts of America", "I Buy American Records", and "Zipcode", among others). The closest they come is in "Finisterre", the last track on the CD. Sarah Churchill (any relation to the PM? I don't know) intones "I believe in Donovan over Dylan, a laugh over cynicism" during a memerizing interior monologue, a retreat into the landscape of the mind. The final chorus — "Finisterre, to tear it down and start again" — is maybe a message, perhaps a manifesto, and, possibly, a hint for those wondering what the band is trying to do.