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Album Review | POP

Time to dance with ‘Words and Music by Saint Etienne’

By Christopher Muther

 |  Globe Staff  

  May 29, 2012

“I was in love, and I knew he loved me because he’d made me a tape,” purrs Saint Etienne frontwoman Sarah Cracknell on the sentimental spoken-word opener of the band’s eighth album. But that retro-glazed fragility, a hallmark for the English trio, evaporates into pulsing electro-pop on its first album in seven years. If the band’s last album, “Tales From the Turnpike House,” was a quiet Sunday morning spent in bed with headphones, dry toast, and a P.G. Wodehouse novel, “Words and Music by Saint Etienne” is a tarted up and perfumed Friday night on the town.

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