The Clientele
The Violet Hour
Merge

The Clientele sounds like love: undulating, overwhelming, temperamental, wayward, lasting forever, in and out of reality, absent of time and place and purpose. It sounds like gray hangover mornings and the shift of seasons. Like haze suffusing empty back alleys, wheezy radiators, empty pints and stretches of neglected industrial towns.

The band's 2001 singles compilation, Suburban Light, invoked the ghosts of such artists as the Velvet Underground, Galaxie 500, Nick Drake and Felt; its first full-length, The Violet Hour does, too. But like those artists, the Clientele creates a mood so insular, so personal, that any connection to musical companions past or contemporary is shrugged off as happenstance. The Violet Hour is a sonic rendering of a world that has never and will never change because it never existed outside the band members' minds.

Each of The Violet Hour's thirteen tracks is built from the broken imagery of a cinematic daydream. A scene is set and slowly panned across, with lingering attention given to the specks and mites, the essence examined piecemeal, as in the wistful reverie, "Everybody's Gone":

Everybody's gone and the fever that lights up the empty room haunts the distances/ The emptiness between us like a miracle, your shoulder bare/ your pen untouched/ you haunted me so much.

Alasdair Maclean ushers in the lyrics, cocooned in the thick sheath of reverb. The bass runs heavy, hot and liquid as lava, the flow of which is controlled by the gentle brush-on-snare backdrop of its rhythm section counterpart. The guitar is as soothing as a lullaby — soft-edged jangles that sear through the heart like the sudden onslaught of nostalgia for something you thought you'd never miss.

Given that these elements are more or less evenly applied throughout The Violet Hour, it would be easy to write the Clientele off as a one-trick pony. And it's true, most of the songs do sound alike. But the genius lies in the way that the subtlest elaboration or subtraction can set one track apart from all the others and keep the collection from sounding the same: slide guitar weaving in and out of "Voices in the Mail"; the lonely, "Homeward Bound"-esque acoustics of "The House Always Wins"; the empty-cathedral echo of "Prelude." The understated instrumental, tempo and mood variations are what make The Violet Hour so great — by the time you reach the closing track, you have not once been jarred out of the reverie induced by the opening title track. From start to finish, the album remains well-paced within a consistent daydream, never veering off into a head-on collision of redundancy.

The celebration of minutiae is also given visual life on the enhanced CD in the form of grainy Super 8 videos (à la Galaxie 500) for two songs — one for the "House of Fire" (The Violet Hour's first single), and one for "Reflections After Jane," a track culled from Suburban Light. They are washed-out studies of modern life; vignettes of urban pastoralism, where the city is a fantasy world. Slow jumbles of disconnected images (sun billowing through windows as the band drinks tea and plays cards in an apartment kitchen or walks tree-lined footpaths) and still lives of concrete, brick buildings and dead-end suburban streets give the Clientele's imagined worlds an axis.

In a real world being lashed to death by the ironic revival of things past, the Clientele is an anomaly. While the band's contemporaries kill time blatantly pilfering rock's gritty clichés, all mussed hair and stray chords, the Clientele is busy fusing inspiration and upstart imagination to construct its own world. And by eschewing the tyranny of trends and the crutch of influence, the Clientele has been able to create a record of substantial weight — one that's unique, personal and unaffectedly real.

— Michael Seidel (michael@alsatia.net)