After that series of challenging improv music a couple of weeks ago, we're having a short run of lush, dreamy pop songs on Music Arcades. If you go to a Damon and Naomi show in London, chances are you'll see one or more of The Clientele either on stage or in the audience.
I'm playing this from the vinyl. I first got the album from eMusic in May 2007, the time of the US release (for some odd reason, it didn't come out in the UK until five months later). I wasn't as blown over by it as I'd hoped to be. Maybe it was because I loved the album that came before so much. But others, like Andy and Alistair, were full of praise, and I stuck with it. Well, after that show at The Luminaire, I revisited all my Clientele music. I also got to know several songs from God Save the Clientele when I saw them six times last year. It was the Luminaire show that prompted me to buy an imported vinyl copy: those American indie labels do vinyl very well; very heavy, very well packaged, with a voucher to download digital versions if you don't already have them. Lovely.
And inevitably the songs have grown on me. I still find the album in general just a little too sweet for my tastes. But a bad Clientele album? No, it's still a treasure. Incongruously, every time I hear the beginning of The Queen of Seville I think of Avalon-Sunset-era Van Morrison. Obviously the vocal is very different, but listen to the arrangement and the mood.
I only just noticed, from reading the inner sleeve closely, that violin and keyboard player and 'fourth member' of the band, Mel Draisey, plays on only three songs on the album. Presumably she only joined part way through the recording. Lucy was with me when we saw her playing with the band at The Spitz on 9 November 2006… not sure if that was her first show.
The Boy also came to one of my six Clientele gigs last year. It was five months before he was born, but I like to think he absorbed some of that experience. Not, I stress, that I'm interested in 'getting him into' The Clientele specifically. That's entirely up to him. But I hope he comes to appreciate the kind of musical experience they make possible. He certainly liked Bookshop Casanova when he heard it yesterday afternoon, doing a little dance on my lap (no sniggering; he's eleven months old, so he doesn't do that kind of lap dance).
A new album, Bonfires on the Heath, is apparently finished and making its tortuous way through the release process as I write. But there's a hint that it might be more than usually tortuous, since a cover for the album appeared on The Clientele blog at the end of last week. Yet now it's disappeared again.
MusicBrainz entry for this album
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