Gig: The Clientele

The Clientele (Field Music)

The Horseshoe Tavern. Friday, March 19, 2010.

I'd first encountered The Clientele at V-Fest 2007, where I made an effort to go check them out on the second stage mostly because I'd read somewhere that they were on Merge Records. And despite what was a semi-successful set — it's ill-advised to show up to a festival gig without a backup guitar — there was something in their songs that quickly had me hooked. I grabbed their then-current album God Save the Clientele the next time I was at Soundscapes, filled in the back catalogue a bit, and snapped up last year's Bonfires on the Heath when it came out, looking forward to a return visit from the London crew.

So, out to the 'Shoe on a Friday night, meeting J., who'd showed up early enough to grab a table in the seating area and hang out a bit before Field Music¹ hit the stage, efficiently and on time, just like one of their songs. I was passingly familiar with the four-piece from Sunderland², now reunited after co-frontmen brothers David and Peter Brewis took some time away from the band with side projects. Switching off, with one on drums while the other brother generally played guit or keybs and sang, we got an efficient twelve songs in forty-five minutes. Their music kept bringing Todd Rundgren to mind. XTC — no strangers to the Rundgrenesque themselves — are a more oft-cited point of comparison, but that works too.

The band mostly pulled from their recent double album Measure, often seguing from song to song. In fact, toward the end of the set, a series of songs from the new album ("See You Later", "Something Familiar", "Share The Words") were played in a sort of mini-suite. They also reached back to their 2005 debut for "If Only The Moon Were Up", and David's selections included a pair from his School of Language side project.³

Sophisticated yet catchy pop — this is the sort of thing that should totally appeal to me. But for some reason it mostly didn't. I mean, I liked it okay — it was fine throughout, and there were some decent songs ("Them That Do Nothing" stood out a bit) and no real clunkers. It's possible that it's a titch too mannered for me. I dunno... some things click and some things don't.

Listen to a track from this set here.

After a reasonably quick turnover, The Clientele made their unassuming entrance, starting with "Since K Got Over Me", the lead-off track from 2005's Strange Geometry. Right from the start, all the elements of the band's sound were in place, especially Alasdair MacLean's ringing guitar and expressive but dryly-delivered vox⁴ — the perfect package for his evocative, literate lyrics. With an unfussy rhythm section not afraid to leave space in the songs, most of the sonic textures came from multi-instrument Mel Draisey.

There's generally an woodsy-England's-green sensibility in MacLean's lyrics, evoked, say, in "We Could Walk Together"'s sights ("through carnivals of shop windows where elm trees sigh"; "the moon high above the motorway.") that isn't entirely so innocent underneath it all ("why don't we stick together / with our eyes so full of evening and amphetamine"). That kind of mix comes up often as the band moved back and forth through their catalogue. There was some chatter in the room (more audible on quieter songs like "Bonfires on the Heath") but it wasn't enough to interfere much with the perfectly lovely music, including the daydream believer cadences of "Here Comes The Phantom", featuring Draisy on violin.

Sometimes it's hard to remember for all their swirly 'sweater-and-a-cup-of-tea' mannered-ness how much of a rock band The Clientele can be, such as with "Never Anyone But You"'s Sterling Morrison-esque tugboat rhythm suggesting a gentler version of the VU's "What Goes On".⁵ That one was pretty fantastic, but now that the band was in their groove, there were further stunners, including "I Hope I Know You" and "Lamplight", the latter pulled from 03's The Violet Hour, which featured an extended coda — and some crafty guitar work — stretching the song past the nine-minute mark. That was good enough to have been the show-stopping set-ender, making the next songs ("Harvest Time", "Bookshop Casanova") a bit anticlimactic. On the other hand "Saturday" (from 2000's singles collection Suburban Light) was quite lovely — I'll have to get my hands on a copy of that one.

An hour-long set, followed by a three-song encore, reaching back again to their earliest days for "Reflections After Jane" and ending with a cover of Television Personalities' "Picture of Dorian Gray". On the whole, really an excellent set and a reminder of just how good The Clientele are. I always tend to think of their primary mood as "autumnal", but they perfectly dazzled on a March night.

Listen to a track from this set here.

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¹ For a while, I kept getting Field Music mixed up with Swedish techno artist The Field. Which, names notwithstanding, makes a kind of sense as both fell into that broad category of well-praised music that I gave a spin but that didn't really stick with me.

² As often happens with visiting British bands, there was one Shouting Englishman who thought he was bosom buddies with the group, sharing a running joke about Norwich F.C. with the room, the relevance of which was quite lost on me.

³ Strangely, I might have enjoyed those the most out of anything in the whole set.

⁴ Referencing another essential element of their sound, MacLean asked, at the first song's end, "how are the vocals out there? Do they have enough reverb on them?"

⁵ That one raised enough heat for MacLean to afterwards issue a request for more towels on stage, lest the band look like "sweaty English monsters". Considering them a song later after they'd been delivered, MacLean asked, "You call them towels in this country, right? Not ta-wulls". This would lead to what may have been the most towel-related banter I'd ever heard at a gig.