All Saints
Saints & Sinners

THE REVIEW

The journey undertaken by the All Saints along the road to success is short-lived. They made their mark during the girl power season, which was also destined to end rather quickly, but they were already in pieces a few months after the release of their second album, "Saints & Sinners". Yet this record had been announced in February 2000 by a quality single like "Pure Shores", which appeared on the soundtrack of the film "The Beach" with Leonardo DiCaprio. And, above all, it was written in collaboration with William Orbit, who had distinguished himself a couple of years earlier in the production of Madonna's "Ray of Light". If the R&B we find on this album is sprinkled with electronics, it is precisely due to Orbit, who intervenes here and there as a producer and co-author.

Twelve tracks, therefore, for the four Anglo-Canadian girls who take their name from a street in London, All Saints' Road, near the recording studio where Melanie Blatt and Shaznay Lewis sang as backup singers at the start of their careers. The other half of the All Saints is represented by the Appleton sisters, Natalie and Nicole (the latter of whom will have a child with Liam Gallagher of Oasis), but it is the two founders who wrote almost all the tracks on the album: Shaznay Lewis, in particular, penned eight of them.

And the atmosphere is that of a party - judging by the cover - and quite joyful, with the girls not caring about being blunt (kiss my ass abounds throughout the tracks of the album) despite all four singing like little angels in "Black Coffee", the second single, and hit, from the album. While in other songs, the individual voices take center stage, that of Melanie Blatt in "I Feel You" (which she, a young mother, dedicates to her daughter), that of Natalie Appleton in "Dreams", especially that of Lewis in the rest of the songs.

Halfway between a sassy easy listening conscious of the trends of the time, and a rhythm and blues infused with electronic sounds, "Saints & Sinners" constitutes a testimony, not entirely negligible, of that particular season of female pop.