The Clientele
Bonfires on the Heath
(Merge, 2009)

The Clientele have come a long way from their stripped-down, late-’90s four-track beginnings. With Alasdair MacLean’s strong and distinctive songwriting intact every step of the way, their ’60s-via-Velvet-y/Galaxie pop has evolved through a period of fog and out into some recently bold, hi-fi productions. Bonfires on the Heath continues that upward spiral, both in terms of ascending production value and of the airy lightness with which their hallmark dreamy melodies unfold. Yet theirs is a dreaminess not entirely based on effects and drones. It’s a little more lucid than that, a dreaminess that couldn’t exist without some troubled mind to dream them.

Songs are light, but not without weight, anchored through it all to the human condition from which they spring. Like all the best pop music, this is also what keeps it from effervescing too cheerily, maintaining just the right amount of shadow beyond the glint. There’s an ever-present element of introspection afforded perhaps by the founding members’ coming of age in the less hyper-stimulated environs of English suburbs—not as bucolic as sheer countryside, but not as frenzied and stultifying as the big city either. “Growing up in the suburbs, you are very aware of always being on the peripheries of life, it’s a very haunting feeling,” MacLean told POPnews in 2001. (English suburbia is not like American suburbia, after all. It can be dreary, but entirely differently from the tract-housing/SUV/strip-mall dystopia currently under foreclosure here in the States.) Of course, for years the Clientele has been a London-based band, and so the alien inspiration they take from surrealist poetry and life on the fringe has grown filtered through all the yearnings and crises of consciousness that city living entails.

read more