Review Summary: And the friends I’ve left behind are speechless in my sunlit mind
I will preface this (gushing) review by bluntly stating that while The Clientele are undoubtedly a great band, my undying love for them is likely a product of the fact that their style and sound fits me like a glove. Even if I try to disguise it, I’m a romantic at heart (as are many fellow Sputnikers, most likely), a person who values music highly for its atmospheric qualities, and additionally am someone who experienced perhaps the best times of my life thus far while studying abroad in England. As such, it’s hard to fathom an artist more ideal to resonate in my soul than The Clientele. After all, the preponderance of the group’s lyrical subject matter is overwhelmingly romantic, not just about the love between two people (although there’s plenty of that, mostly of the lost and forlorn variety), but more generally stuff like wandering a near-deserted city at night, vines clinging to old buildings, the light of the moon and the stars illuminating a tranquil scene, you get the idea… As far as atmosphere goes, I’m not sure anyone has ever done this particular type of a beautiful melancholia better, a sort of agonizingly piercing sense of nostalgia. And then there’s the fact that The Clientele’s music is very British, or more specifically very attuned with London. Their songs are peppered with references to places like St. James Park and Haringey, locales that as an American, albeit a well-read one with an Anglophile tendency, I’ve at best visited a few times and at worst found mention of in one form of media or another. While this propensity could seem lame or feigned, in the case of The Clientele it feels genuine and only adds to the immersiveness of the band’s stylings.
2003’s
The Violet Hour is The Clientele’s first full-length album, following the band’s initial triumph,
Suburban Light , which was a collection of singles the band had compiled throughout the 90s. Neither release achieved much commercial success, but both received rave reviews and have emerged as (more or less) cult classics. The band would go on to a solid career, even if their largely one-note stylings wore a little thinner as time went on (although every single one of their albums would be an enviable achievement for most artists). For this group, perfecting a slice of the feeling they aimed to capture was everything, and in that respect
The Violet Hour is their peak, even if
Suburban Light and 2005’s
Strange Geometry arguably contain more of the band’s best individual tracks.
This album bursts right out of the gates with the title track, which introduces the listener to the essentials of The Clientele’s (rather simple) default settings. The band relies on reverb-drenched, vaguely dreamy instrumentation and poetic lyrics, delivered in frontman’s Alasdair MacLean’s curiously wispy vocals. While one can easily see that the band has borrowed from a lineage of indie pop, twee, and jangle outfits in their home country (as well as sides of dream pop and 60s-folk rock), the genius of it all is that The Clientele somehow don’t really sound like anyone else, even within these well-trodden musical territories, and additionally that they sound timeless, or more accurately, simply “out of time”. This is important, as it solidifies the band’s atmosphere, with their chosen vibe and imagery feeling variously appropriate to time periods of London from the Victorian era all the way through the present day (after all, the album title appears to be an allusion to T. S. Eliot’s 1922 poem “The Waste Land”).
Not every listener might agree, but I’ve always thought most of this album’s highlight tracks are in the first half, with songs like “The Violet Hour”, “When You And I Were Young” and the utter gem “Missing” deserving a mention. In the mid-to-late part of the tracklist, there’s a bit of a lull of more subtle pieces, like the quiet “Everybody’s Gone” and the classical “Prelude”, but taken on their own terms each of these songs are immensely pretty and perfectly retain the record’s inherent atmosphere, a mix of dreamy beauty and bittersweet nostalgia, the sound of strolling urban streets after dark, alone with your thoughts and memories. The tolling of church bells which interrupt the transition between tracks several times only add to this masterfully-executed ambience. Finally, closer “Policeman Getting Lost” is a bare scrap of a song after the album’s two longest tunes. Hardly topping two minutes, and fairly minimalistic, it feels like it shouldn’t really function as a whole piece, but stunningly does, proving absolute perfection as the capstone of an understated but gorgeous and touching album.
The lyrical subject matter here deserves specific praise as well. The Clientele’s lines have always been shockingly cohesive from song to song, and even album to album, in that you could (often) pick out a particular lyric and insert it into a completely different one of their tunes, and it wouldn’t feel out of place. Normally, this would seem to be a mark against them, but in this case it’s just a reflection of the lithe poetry which comprises nearly all of their songs (instrumentals excluded). The consuming lyrical obsessions here are nostalgic reminiscences and portraits of nocturnal urban life. While I could quote a brilliant line or two from every song, I’ll just shout out a few especially wonderful turns of phrase, from the line in “House On Fire” which comprises this review’s summary, to “golden evenings pass me by, beneath a dream of darker eyes” in “Haunted Melody”, and “I’ve been walking out in the verges and the quiet” from “Lamplight”.
Early in the title track opener, Alasdair MacLean sings “all my friends are loaded and they smile”, a backwards-looking string of words which represents a shimmering distillation of one of those fragmented memories which, for whatever reason, cling to us as a reminder of bygone times as we grow older. This sort of thing forms the eternal appeal of
The Violet Hour , a lonesome atmospheric masterpiece which will illuminate and enhance the thoughts, dreams, and remembrances of those listeners lucky enough to discover it. Is this an everyday sort of album? Nope, but I’m not sure you’ll find a better listen for a warm night when you’re in a thoughtful mood and the past feels unreachable and yet close at hand.
