Music Arcades: The Clientele: Strange Geometry

Just an amazing record. It stands shoulder to shoulder with The Amber Gatherers as my favourite of the millennium so far. These are the kinds of breathtaking experiences that remind you why you bother listening to music, and collecting albums.

Still, it was an unusual courtship. Looking it up, I see the album came out in that last Ashes summer of 2005, but it was at least a year later that I first heard it, one of my early downloads after I joined eMusic. Straight away I was impressed, and thought it was the best thing The Clientele had ever done (hence my earlier comment about reviewing my opinion about the best Clientele album — which I've done, and Strange Geometry is still it). Yet I'm older now, and don't pop my cork for every gorgeous collection of great songs that I hear. It would be another year and a bit before that Clientele show at the Luminaire that I keep going on about (1, 2) before I did that. And at that point I decided that I needed a vinyl copy of the album to complement my downloads.

You see, the way I get to know an album is very different from how it was 25 years ago. Back then I'd get the record home, cue it up on the turntable and listen with the sleeve on my lap. If there was a lyric sheet I'd use that not so much to decipher the words as to parse each song, to absorb the structure of verse, chorus, bridge and so on. I got to know an album by breaking it down, identifying my favourite parts. Now it's much more diffuse. I got to know Strange Geometry almost entirely on my iPod Shuffle, walking the streets of London or at the gym. Consequently I couldn't see the titles of the songs, let alone their words, and they blurred into each other as I negotiated busy pavements and road crossings. The album seeps into me by osmosis, an undifferentiated whole rather than a series of parts.

I might catch myself humming a tune or singing a (usually misremembered) phrase like "It's just the spirit" without knowing which song it's from &mdash or even sometimes what album it's on. And so there's always a frisson of surprise when the song appears unbidden, like an old lover, on Side Two (it's called, remarkably, Spirit). "Redbrick sweatshops and manassas," that's another one: it turns out to be on Geometry of Lawns, and it's "madrassahs" not "manassas" (shame, an oblique references to Steven Stills' band would have had its own poetry).

So now I've had the vinyl copy, with its lyric sheet, for a year and a half. But opportunities to sit down alone with them have been rare. I'm not in a hurry. I love it that I'm still not quite sure which songs follow which. I love the surprise that comes when I think that the best moments of the album are behind me — it starts with Since K Got Over Me, which is is one hell of a way to kick off — only to be taken unawares by a song I've forgotten and which makes me swoon all over again. I look forward to spending the rest of my life getting more and more familiar with each moment on this record.