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The Violet Hour, Voices In The Mall, When You And I Were Young, Missing, Jamaican Rum Rhumba, Lamplight, House On Fire, Everybody's Gone, Porcelain, Haunted Melody, Prelude, The House Always Wins, Policeman Getting Lost, (Films in enhanced section: 1.Reflections After Jane; 2. House On Fire) |
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The Guardian
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"Ever more intent on discovering the essence of indie, the Clientele are back with an album that dissolves like a daydream and aches like a jilted bride.
These songs are heavy with an innocence that's painfully aware of its fleeting nature, slightly ominous but ever hopeful. Atmospheric guitarist and hushed vocalist Alistair MacLean offers Novocaine for a wounded soul. The title track has laid back and layered vocals that entice us into the quicksand melodies, evoking the pioneering spirit of the Byrds and the charm of the Beatles.
Each track sticks to the same melancholic rhythms and textured sound, save for the collision of lyrics in Missing and gently crashed cymbals of Jamaican Rum Rhumba. Though The House Always Wins unlocks a tidal wave of frustration with its nervy guitars, the change of pace can't prevent the numbness." |
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4/5, Jim Allen - Uncut
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| "UK popsters catch heaven in a bottle on second album. The Clientele manage to surpass their hotly tipped 2000 debut by refining their wispy sound to a pure, delicate pop breeze as evocative of bucolic summer afternoons as anything in the Brian Wilson catalogue. The languorous, breathy feel here has antecedents in everything from the Left Banke to Belle & Sebastian, but 'The Violet Hour' transcends twee and '60s pop influences in songs that work on an almost subliminal level. It's hard to think of a quieter recording, at times you can almost hear the amps buzzing,but this is surely one of the most magical pop albums of 2003." |
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8/10, Tim Jonze - NME
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"Do not attempt to drive or operate heavy machinery while listening to Londoners' hazy debut of tripped-out, folk perfection. Fuck those 'Parental Advisory: Explicit Lyrics' labels. If people really cared about the side effects of popular music then they'd force The Clientele to release a version of this record in a non-drowsy format. It's so hazy, spaced-out and spliff-addled that it took this writer nine attempts to write about it without pulling a 'whitey' and drifting into unconsciousness.
The London three-piece have released a string of singles and EPs since they formed in 1997, but this is their first proper full-length record. It's completely detached from the current music scene, taking smoke-hazed '60s psychedelia as its starting point and getting so blissed out it can barely move its limbs to find an ending point. But there's far more than retro-fetishism at work here. For every trad backwards-guitar sound, we get brain-bendingly fragile acoustic arrangements that are less zonked-out acid casualty than Lampchop playing Chinese whispers with Tortoise.
The intro to 'Voices In The Mall' weaves a web so delicate it wouldn't wake a sleeping Simon And Garfunkel, while the reverb-soaked vocals aim for the off-switch on Jason Pierce's life-support machine only to hit the guitar pedal marked 'Ultra-swoon' by mistake. Elsewhere, drums skip gently ('House On Fire') and picked acoustics hang in the air like pastel-coloured fog ('Everybody's Gone').
But while the music evokes lazy summer evenings, there's a melancholy that aches through the lyrics. 'Missing' is particularly sad ("I've got so much longing in my heart/I can't even sleep" whispers Alasdair MacLean) and 'Porcelain' conjures up a sense of detuned menace, like Slint putting the willies up Yo La Tengo.
Every so often a record pops up that seems to exist in some alien world, unscathed by hipster fads and driven forward only by its own gorgeous mindset. With 'The Violet Hour', The Clientele have made a beautifully haunting album of music to take drugs to make music to take drugs to." |
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MOJO
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| "The gas fire that refuses to fade, the terraced houses that tilt towards the autumn sun - The Clientele's observations are caught between memory and imagination, a welcome idiosyncrasy that blesses even the most prosaic imagery with a quiet nobility. While their lyrics gently play on the minutiae of mundanity, the 13 tracks here drift from Felt-lined fragility to reserved Luna-ish experimentalism, with seashore guitars and sunset drums combining with Alasdair MacLeans's whispered vocals to melifluous effect. Some may bemoan the lack of scope in these hushed meditations, the absence of envelope pushing and the polite refusal to posit a tangible agenda. But more will find comfort in the warm surrender of The Clientele's aesthetic, the sweet, curious familiarity that lies in the indistinct and the allusive.
Sarah Dempster" |
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Careless Talk Costs Lives
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"It's often been said that The Clientele inhabit some of the country once visited by Felt, and if that's true then it's true in the sense that the Clientele also implicitly understand the value of formula to Pop; know that invention and imagination running wild works best when roped in by structure; share an awareness of the importance of mystery and of keeping your distance.
So for much of the past five years The Clientele have been quietly ploughing their own furrow, releasing a stream of fragile seven inch singles for a range of international labels and collecting most of them on an album appropriately titled 'Suburban Light'. 2003 however sees them emerge from the cocoon of a Finsbury Park basement where, surrounded by vintage tape delays, reverb units and an exploding 16 track reel-to-reel, they crafted the thirteen songs that make up 'The Violet Hour'.
Full of memorable profiles half-glimpsed through cigarette smoke and half-remembered day-dreams rolling down from the yellowing pages of half-forgotten novels,'The Violet Hour' is a soundtrack to the favourite Truffaut movie you never even knew existed"
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2003 Daniel Williams
Read it here »
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"It's very easy for a London-based Clientele fan to think of and claim the group as belonging to London. There are the reference to parts of the capital that pepper both Suburban light and The violet hour, the numerous chances to see them in the variety of halls, pubs, theatres and dives which dot central London, and now the images of the east of the city in the video of 'House on fire': a black and white London of fissures and crevices, tears in the fabric, decaying rail yards, deserted streets, and alleyways giving glimpses of new buildings going up in the City. But I would like to have my cake and eat it by being able to hear them without any personal experience of London, only an imagined, far-off idea of the place drawn from music, film, fiction, general knowledge: a Dickensian Wonderland shot through with barbs of electric guitar and red buses.
And perhaps The Violet Hour would serve to reshape that vision, and make me itch to quit New York, Melbourne or Bordeaux for the Smoke. Alternatively, overlooking the concrete references or mapping them onto another city's equivalent, I might find myself thinking that The violet hour happily or lamentingly soundtracks the sights and sounds of San Francisco, Dunedin or Valencia (the bells that sound to mark the transition from 'Voices in the mall' to 'When you and I were young' and later from 'Prelude' to 'Lamplight' have more of the air of the Mediterranean than of North London). But as much as London, and more than the art pop of the West Coast which partly inspires it, the Clientele's music also evokes the Home Counties: the end of the suburbs and the beginning of the English countryside, a landscape veined with stop-start commuter trains into London and the rarely disturbed waters of canals, where summer sunsets silhouette clutches of baking semis.
Recorded in a Finsbury Park version of the Black Ark with their very own Lee 'Scratch' Perry, 'Steady' Mike Jones, The violet hour refines the Clientele's particular take on the aural possibilities of guitar, bass and drums. Like obsessive painters, they're again trying to capture sunlight, moonlight, the electric glow of an interior, gas fire domesticity. There is guitar of a virtuosity to match that of Felt's Maurice Deebank, and of a distinctiveness approaching the wiry Rickenbacker crackle of the Byrds. The voice is distinctly English, despite its occasional Dylanesque inflections, and other-worldly, but not given to speaking in tongues. Magic powders of the past have also been added - a sprinkling of the psychedelic, a dusting of dubbiness, so that when listening to The violet hour, time is held suspended, and occasionally even goes backwards. The influences never dominate - you catch fleeting glimpses of them before they intermingle and twist the sound away from 2003 and into the twilight zone of timelessness. The melodies and songs manage to feel both immediate and somehow beyond reach, like ghosts. It's quite a trick, this, to offer something that is at once present and just out of reach. It takes time to get to know The violet hour. You can't learn everything about it on first listen.
Pop music is about what happens moment to moment as much as it is about whole songs or albums. An ordinary song may contain a moment of sonic beauty, perfection, or surprise, deliberately delivered or accidentally conjured. If a great song contains great moments, well, there's no stopping it. Take Love's 'Your mind and we belong together' (amazingly released only as a B side). Two minutes in, a typical Love song - Arthur Lee trilling and the bass bouncing a little flatly along - breaks down into the same struck guitar chord, moves into a more recognisable bridge, and reverts to the staccato guitar effect. Then, at 2 minutes 40 seconds, there's a buzz, a signal-like sound - the released catch of an electric door perhaps - and all hell breaks loose, or at least, the kind of guitar solo that just about retains its cool and doesn't necessitate an excess of gurning from its player.
The Clientele also write songs which pursue unusual paths. Were you to plot them on a graph, they would more often resemble something an economist might draw to illustrate boom and bust than waves or parabolas. They are keen conveyors of mood as well, and mood is about sound, so along the way there are many of those great moments. The best occurs towards the end of 'The house always wins' - and now that I'm about to describe it, I realise that it's a bit like giving away which character dies at the end of the latest Harry Potter, or revealing the football scores before the highlights are shown, so look away now if you want to discover this for yourself... At approx. 7:13 a crescendo of electric fuzz towards which the song has consistently been building suddenly peaks and drops away, returning to the song's measured and gentle introductory bars. It's spine-tingling; and even more so live. Other songs which give you an idea of what the Clientele can do moment to moment in a live setting are 'Porcelain' and 'Lamplight', the former with its thrumming jags of bass and guitar, and the latter when its delicacy eventually gives way to an explosion of the kind of bell-pure plucking that decorates all of the group's songs.
The core of The Violet Hour is guitar music bred on guitar music; other influences are nominal, more of approach than surfacing in the sound. 'Jamaican rum rhumba' is an exquisite miniature, blood relative to 'Christopher' on the Claim's Boomy Tella, a breeze of an instrumental, perfect and lean, while Mark offers up a 'Prelude' which is more like the Felt of 'Candles in a church' and 'Ferdinand Magellan' in its careful handling than it is a homage to Chopin or Satie.
Meteorologists will note that only the odd shower is forecast on this Clientele record. However, there are the autumnal intimations of the title track, its mood echoing another great song of cold, distance, loss, and ethereality, the Chills' 'Pink frost', and also the heat haze of 'House on fire', which isn't, you'll be relieved to hear, a cover of the Dennis Bovell-produced Boomtown Rats single of 1982. But it is dub in feel, with James' laid-back bass making a melodic foray through the unmown grass of a London open space - the Heath, the Common, or perhaps Kensington Gardens north of the Albert Memorial - in search of 'the door to summer', very possibly the same door the Monkees faded through on Pisces, Aquarius, Capricorn & Jones Ltd. back in 1967.
Despite their many previous recordings, The violet hour is actually the Clientele's first album proper, so it seems fair enough that it should encapsulate a sound with which fans have become familiar. Next I would like them to surprise us, if not with a jolt, then with a shift in direction. But for now here is the first unified set of Clientele recordings in which to immerse yourself. Wherever in the world you are." |
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Heather Phares - All Music Guide, Barnes & Noble website
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"In some ways, it's hard to believe that The Violet Hour is the Clientele's first proper full-length album. The band has released so many lovely singles and EPs in the five years prior to this album that it seems like a full-length release must have come out a few years ago (2001's singles collection The Suburban Light doesn't count).
The wait was well worth it, though; The Violet Hour not only perfects the gorgeously hazy pop of their previous releases, it also adds a guileless freshness to it that is completely apt for their debut album. As with most of their other work, in The Violet Hour's world it's always summer, and usually sunset; instantly nostalgic, poignant tunes such as "Voices in the Mall" and "Everybody's Gone" capture the dusky side of summer perfectly. Indeed, most of the album reflects -- and radiates -- warmth, from its generally languid mood to the way its songs blend into each other like slow-flowing honey.
Alistair McClean's whispery vocals are drenched in faraway reverb, and, along with the band's sleepy guitars and understated drums, create such an exquisite ambience that the album's unhurried tempos and melodies never sound boring. While "The Violet Hour" and "House on Fire" breeze along on slightly livelier tempos, and "The House Always Wins" ignites into the Clientele's version of rock, none of these songs break the spell that is cast by "When You and I Were Young," "Lamplight" and "Haunted Melody" and that is deepened by the chiming bells that punctuate the album. With so much going on musically, The Violet Hour doesn't even need meaningful
lyrics, but it delivers those too, especially on "Missing," where McClean sighs, "I've got so much longing in my heart that I can't even sleep" with such sweetly quiet resignation that it's breathtaking, once you hear it.
It's true that the Clientele's influences still shine through in their music, yet the band doesn't sound derivative; by not trying to overtly rework their sound or hide their roots, they allow themselves - and their listeners - to just revel in the beauty of their music. So, while The Violet Hour doesn't offer anything different from the Clientele's previous work, it does offer more of it, which is a wonderful thing."
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Jennifer Nine - Bang
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| "Inspirations: suburbia, precipitation, drifting paley through the imaginary 60s
What's in a name? Unlike wistful-pop peers Trembling Blue Stars, The Clientele's name contains no hint of the reverb-soaked, dreamy genre that powdery-voiced Alasdair Maclean and his exquisite London trio inhabit.
On the other hand, drifting through the rainy autumnal streets conjured by a piano and tape hissed 'Prelude' and the shyly ecstatic rockout of 'The House Always Wins', "clientele seems oddly apt. This lovely album, their second, after bits-and-singles compilation 'Suburban Light', hits its pale and delicate target market dead on. Indeed, in its own gossamer way, 'The Violet Hour' twines around you with a tout's persistence, whispering — instead of "hash-coke-speed", something that sounds, well exactly like "Galaxie 500-Felt-Love-Television". Truth in advertising, and the stuff of intoxication to boot. 3 stars" |
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THE CLIENTELE
Website
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The Clientele formed a long time ago in the backwoods of suburban Hampshire, playing together as kids at school, rehearsing in a thatched cottage remote from any kind of music scene, but hypnotised by the magical strangeness of Galaxie 500 and Felt, and the psych pop of Love and the Zombies. During a pub conversation the band collectively voted that it was OK to be influenced by Surrealist poetry but not OK to have any shouting or blues guitar solos. From that moment on they put their stamp on a kind of eerie, distanced pure pop, stripped to its essentials and recorded quickly to 4 track analogue tape.
These recordings were released as lovingly packaged 7 singles at the tail-end of the 90s, and compiled as the millennium ended into the debut album, Suburban Light, now hailed as one of the finest records of the decade. From the faded pop art of Suburban Light came a move into the fog with the 2nd LP, The Violet Hour, released in 2003. An attempt to create a deeper, more mysterious sound, it was an archetypal Clientele record: hypnotic, self-enclosed, meticulously creating its own world.
The Clientele re-invented their music with Strange Geometry (2005) and God Save the Clientele (2007); Brian O Shaughnessy (My Bloody Valentine, Primal Scream) and Mark Nevers produced, and El Records legend Louis Philippe provided typically gorgeous string arrangements. The sound was bigger, brighter, and clearer, MacLean s ringing, classically-influenced guitar style and James Hornsey s melodic bass combining to create a different kind of depth and atmosphere for the newly sparkling songs, which now came complete with crossover appeal; incongruously, one of them even featured in the Keanu Reeves / Sandra Bullock weepie, "The Lake House".
Bonfires on the Heath (2009) is in a sense a return to the Clienteles roots; the dreamlike suburban landscapes first encountered in the early singles, their trippy sense of menace stronger now. Back in London, theyve drawn on older traditions of English folk, which exist here side-by-side with the band's more familiar bossa and pop elements, creating a timeless eeriness. Its often said the best bands create their own sound; the Clientele have gone one further and created an entire world.
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