Customer Reviews

Tourist

5 star:		(79)
4 star:		(20)
3 star:		(5)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

"Tourist" by St Germain is the smoothest of the Euro Techno albums I have found (although I am fairly new to the genre). The album opening is reminiscent of Brubeck but heads off in a distinctly Techno direction. The vocals are minimal and in English! (The band is billed as French). This music is not necessarily for dancing; much better for listening. Very mellow and romantic.

Fusion of roots, dance, electro-pop and other styles. Never tiresome, always simple with a strong melodic bass line, this is perfect background music for a party or a bar. And that's not a bad thing. So much better than Muzak, so much more to it. So French.

Tourist by St. Germain is one of those albums that I doubt I'll ever tire of. Could have been a perfect album without weak tracks, "Montego Bay Spleen" and "What You Think About..." which in my opinion are just average. Nonetheless, the album is great with the now classic "Rose Rouge", "Pont des Arts", and "La Goutte d'Or" topping out as my favorites. Any fan of lounge music or electro-jazz should own a copy of Tourist.

4/5 stars

I have always been a lover of classic, acoustic jazz, but St. Germain has topped off my pleasure scale with the amazing fusion of classic style with electronic flair. There are no words to express the way this music seduces heart and mind. It's like a soul bridge to a transparent world that runs somehow simultaneous with our mundane, daily existence. And when you step down into that other place you wonder how you could have lived elsewhere.

The thing that strikes me the most about St. Germain is the consistent and simple grooves that are almost predictable and unmoving...but not quite. They evolve slowly, conservatively peppered with lively, brief bursts and subtle, almost ghost melodies in the distance. Motego Bay Spleen is a perfect example of this. So Flute does similar but the expressions of melody beyond the main groove are erratic and playful, leaving you always guessing what's coming next. Land of...starts out with an organ funk piece that digs into your deepest soul and slowly ebbs into a "walking" groove (for lack of a better term) and horn work that you can't help but move to. Sure Thing is the most urban-feeling song on the album with spicy (and at times, dissonant) electric guitar riffs and soulful, almost unintelligible vocals that work the human voice like an instrument. Outstanding. I haven't found a song on this CD that I don't like.

I don't know if it's possible to become bored with St. Germain, but it's entirely conceivable to become lost.

Tourist is not just one of the better cds out there, but it is one of the best cds in my collection which is quite obviously the best cd collection in the world. Buy it, if you don't like it, you're not only deaf, but also retarded.

Whereas the spirit of jazz seems to have been castrated here in the United States, giving birth to all sorts of perverse "smooth jazz" incarnations, elsewhere in the world - particularly in France, it would seem - jazz is dancing and celebrating life as passionately as ever.

St. Germain is a wonderfully delicious mix of house beats and jazz improvisation; rather than rehash old jazz tunes and subject them to an electronica-plastered martyrdom, St. Germain - Ludovic Navarre and company - use live instrumentation for their creative and intoxicating mix. A little Latin groove here, some hip-hop and r&b there, a driving house beat and downright manic solos all fit together to remind us of what it is that jazz is supposed to be.

This is one of the few CDs that I own that really seems to cross over and through the various genre gaps; it is smooth - that is, sexy and classy (without being pretentious) at the same time - but also has an excess of pizazz that keeps the listener engaged and flowing. Such genre-bending both subverts and converts jazz as it has been and propells it into a potential future-made-present; the rumors of a better sound are heard here as a whisper expressed in symphonic song.

Perhaps[?] oddly enough, everyone that I have ever played this CD for - whether a 19 year-old Marine, a banker in her mid-40s, or college students that prefer rap and its various metal cross-breeds - liked it. While I doubt world peace will begin with bringing the people together to listen to St. Germain's "Tourist", at the same time there really is something ... beautiful about so many different people being able to listen to and appreciate the same music. It whispers something of the beauty within human subjects.

This is a really, really great CD; 5 stars does not do it justice as it is in a class of its own, far beyond the all-too-quantitative measurement of 5 stars. It breathes spirit and creativity - the best that music as expression and imagination has to offer. Paint your canvas with some passionate new colors; bring the diaspora of your friends together...

Quite simple. Before this album, nobody did it. After this album, a new story has started.

After the first time I listened to it I was sure I have never heard anything like it. You have to listen to a really good CD a few times to discover its quality, but in "Tourist" it is easy to find you are listening to something totally different.

I have read to many other reviews and it's amazing to see everybody can find distinctive elements in this album. In my opinion, I think we are in front of a new style and sure it will mark tendencies of a lot of future recordings.

Every one of the songs have something new. Mixtures of jazz, funk, disco, salsa, indie. A perfect combination. "C'est comme ça".

Quite simply, Tourist is a quintessential album to own for those interested in Europe's developing jazz and house scene. Artist Ludovic Navarre fuses blues and jazz instrumentation and improvisational ideas with house beats and loops while adding a distinctly European folk feel to his music. The songs on this album span a wide breadth of influence, from US jazz and house to Latin beats and goes across the Atlantic to the Cafes of France for the ambience. Perfect for mixing. Always lively without being overbearing, this CD is a perfect addition to anyone's library and a necessary one for afficionados of the genre.

this is an -awesome- cd, my only problem with it is that it seems to kinda lose its inspiration towards the end. because the music is based on more "traditional" musical composition than sound design concepts (as most deep house/downtempo etc is) when you run out of ear-grabbing musical ideas theres not a whole lot left to maintain the intrigue. its because of this that things seem to drag towards the end, the initial vitality of the house/dub/downtempo breaks fused with jazz compositions having been worn out, so that the last couple cuts sound like the "same old" but less effective use of the formula that produced the amazing opener.

anyway that somewhat minor and common gripe aside, this is really amazing stuff. ludovic's production skills are absolutely top-notch.. not in terms of studio trickery and sound-making, like BT or other producer legends of the electronic scene, but in terms of the perfection of his grooves. especially on "sure thing", one of the best tracks on this disc, where this ridiculously smooth and refined hip hop-inspired beat comes rolling out of the speakers like smoke, intertwined with a processed rhodes piano or something like that, dominating the whole stereo field and driving one of the best grooves i have ever heard from a live or electronic musician. "Rose Rouge" is the same sort of thing, all the pieces fit together so flawlessly in ludovic's bumping house beat that pretty much anything the soloists pull out on top of it would sound good.

not to discredit the live players, cuz the beats are not of course the only good thing about this stuff, the other half of st germain's unique fusion is the bouncing and energetic yet tastefully refined and sophisticated live music that he mixes into his sweet-ass beats. there is great playing from a small collection of live musicians, sax and trumpet taking leads on a number of tracks, a beautifully explorative guitar noodle over the 5 minutes of "montego bay spleen", the infamous barnstorming flute that opens "So Flute" (which then, i might add, somewhat decays into a largely uninteresting mere shadow of the bumpingly awesome house of Rose Rouge). everything about this disc seems to be exactly where it needs to be, yet doesnt feel forced or contrived, the way some supposedly "hip" progressive music does. highly recommended for anybody into the deep house/downtempo/nu jazz or general jazz scenes

I've owned "Tourist" for two years now, and last night was the first time I really "listened" to it without skipping through it...at first I thought this was garbage and I really only liked the song "Sure Thing", but after cranking this baby up and dimming all the lights down--save the burning of my blueberry scented candles from a certain dollar store that shall remain nameless--St. Germain's "Tourist" has become one of my favorite CDs! With styles of Jazz, House and Electronica all rolled into one, this is a classic for all fans of those genres. What I thought was "garbage" satisfied me more than any other CD I own--and believe me I got a lot of them! "Tourist" is very timely and hip, and a brilliant piece of work from St. Germain! DANG!! Do the French know how to jam or what?!!!