The Clientele’s last album, “Music for the Age of Miracles,” felt like it could have been a finale for the band—there was something there in the album, haunted and elegiac, a sense that things were disappearing, ending, emptying out. But here they are, six years later, with a new album, the even more haunting and elegiac (and beautiful) “I Am Not There Anymore.”
Musically, this is the most adventurous the band has ever been. Early singles “Blue Over Blue” and “Dying in Mary” highlighted the band’s use of programmed beats, samples, unusual rhythms (Alasdair MacLean said “Dying in May” has an Arabic flamenco rhythm), drones, and general willingness to take some big swings. In some ways, a lot of this feels like a progression from what they did on “Everything You See Tonight Is Different from Itself” on “Music for the Age of Miracles,” a six-minute epic that prominently featured programmed beats and samples. There’s the bossa nova of “Claire’s Not Real,” the big beats and distorted guitar of “Garden Eye Mantra,” cut-up beats, samples, and field recordings on “The Village Is Always on Fire,” it’s a thread that runs through the album, the band becoming less mellow and more experimental with age. [Also not to gloss over the gorgeous interstitial songs by Mark Keen that break up the album: Radials B, C, E, and H, all delicate, lapidary works].
The album starts with the truly tremendous “Fables of the Silverlink,” an almost nine-minute masterpiece and one of the most moving things the Clientele have ever written. As a lyric writer, MacLean has a seemingly supernatural skill for being able to pick out the right concrete details, the right sequence of words, that can create a vivid atmosphere and provoke genuine emotion. “Fables of the Silverlink” doesn’t quite seem like it’s telling a linear narrative, it feels more like scenes and memories and imagining put together through association, but the whole effect is one of reflection, grief, joy, gratitude, a mix of moments from different times within a life. Much of the album, MacLean has said, is focused on memories of his mother’s death and memories of his childhood, and he sings in this song about both. “Fables of the Silverlink” starts with a string phrase, programmed drums, and MacLean’s vocals; a minute in, the guitar enters, live drums, and it sounds a little more like a standard Clientele song. Around two minutes, there are some big horns, and it all shifts up a gear while MacLean sings, “Still, so still/with your hands on your face/and I kissed your eyes…” “I was young again/I was young again.” And then the song drops back to strings, programmed drums, and Spanish vocals from Alicia Macanás before transitioning again to one of the most beautiful sections of the song, with MacLean singing, (at one point accompanied only by the strings): “Here in the face of your child/here in the face of your child/After you wake/after the dream/after your father’s hands have cradled still/your sleeping hair/his voice is so real/calling the girl that you were/calling you back through the night/lost and found in the fire/lost and found in the fire.” Later, at the end of the song, another moment of staggering beauty: the song slows, the horns bend and swell, and MacLean sings “I remember days at school/when the only thing I knew/I was nobody at all/till the streetlamps broke the spell/I don’t know why.” The conjunction of music and lyrics in this song work together to create something it would be hard to get at otherwise, an impressionistic autobiography that captures fleeting experiences and the feelings that accompany those experiences so faithfully for the listener.
“Garden Eye Mantra” is another key song on the album. This one launches with a really interesting blend of sampled beats (or cut-up samples of Keen’s drums), cicada-like rattles, a slow guitar and bass combo, and strings. MacLean enters about two minutes in and sings, later, “What am I?/Talk to me/Why weren’t you frightened of the dark?” and then the song transitions abruptly, via distorted guitar, to these phrases, repeated: “Out in the dark/the hatchbacks are rolling/windows unwound and the cigarettes glowing/the blue air and cigarettes so far and close/nobody knows where the garden eye goes,” with other slight variations until the end of the song.
“Blue Over Blue,” the first single from the album, is about MacLean getting lost on a walk in the woods with his young son. This song has such a sweet, bouncy feel, with what sounds like acoustic guitar, live drums and other (programmed) percussion, a bracing distorted guitar (?) sample, and horns. Here, MacLean sings a line about “playing hide and seek between doors,” which echoes a line he sings earlier in the album, on the beautiful “Lady Grey,” “My mother taught me how to die/it’s like playing hide and seek.” There’s a lot of echoes on this album—lines repeated, or lines that half-recall other lines, lines that feel like a slant-thyme with other lines. There’s something MacLean does here, singing about his son, and earlier in the album, singing about his mother’s death, that seems like a recognition of the weirdness of the continuum from ancestors to descendants: understanding what it’s like to be someone’s child and later to be someone’s parent; seeing your parents and others grow old and die; knowing you will grow old and die too.
And this is what MacLean sings about on the second-to-last song of the album, the gorgeous “I Dreamed of You, Maria.” I think that MacLean’s mostly singing in this song about dreaming an appearance of his mother (though of course I’m not sure), seeing her “in a doorway by the sea” and singing “your sickness lay so light on you/like a feather in your palm/like a corner street where music comes.” It’s a sweet song, a song maybe on the other side of grief, and then it shifts slightly with the horns, and MacLean sings, “One morning I/awoke so early/I didn’t know who I was/blown like rain just like I was coming across/and I knew that I would die,” and the song swells and collapses a bit, until MacLean reiterates the end of “Garden Eye Mantra:” “out in the dark/the hatchbacks are rolling/windows unwound and the cigarettes glowing…”
“I Am Not There Anymore” is a towering album and sits alongside their best. It feels like a statement album, at once a summation of what they’ve done before and an evolution.