Review Summary: But you follow the light through the lanes
Let’s dive right in, shall we? The Clientele remain (sadly) nearly unknown on Sputnik, so an introduction is in order. This British group has always mined a particular font of inspiration: a sensation of twilit and nostalgic melancholy. Sedate and dreamy indie pop songs are their one and only calling card, full of surreal poetry, delivered languidly. That utter specialization hasn’t proved a problem, given nobody else sounds quite like them. The band’s heyday was in the early 2000s, when they achieved cult status with well-received releases like compilation
Suburban Light and LPs
The Violet Hour and
Strange Geometry. The late 2000s/early 2010s then saw a handful more great (but marginally inferior) albums and EPs before a near-decade-long hiatus.
Said hiatus was broken by 2017’s
Music for the Age of Miracles. It was a triumphant return, delivering another dose of something fans of the band feared might’ve been gone for good - sleepy but immensely atmospheric songs which immediately transport the listener to a rainy evening in London in an indeterminate decade. However, the album also proved a low-key affair, not truly aspiring to improve upon the band’s earlier works. Now, six years later,
I Am Not There Anymore marks what is effectively the band’s second comeback effort, and it’s a very different sort of return. The Clientele’s newest addition to their distinguished catalog is the grandest thing they’ve ever attempted: not only being their longest record (over an hour in duration), but also featuring the largent number of tracks of any of their efforts (nineteen in total), and the release which aims for the most thematic coherence (approaching true concept-album territory). All three of these factors reveal some associated flaws, but the band remains in fine form and provides us with a sweeping success which measures up quite well to their best material.
I Am Not There Anymore draws inspiration from frontman Alasdair MacLean’s younger years and more specifically from his memories of the days surrounding the death of his mother in 1997. The songs here are, as such, more conceptually-focused than usual for the band, filled with repeating lyrical motifs, even if this sort of backwards-looking and emotionally resonant material isn’t too far removed from The Clientele’s bread-and-butter fare. In some respects, it also feels like a spiritual successor to 2009’s
Bonfires on the Heath, sharing with that album an Arcadian vibe much more rural and attuned with nature than the band’s prototypical “city as night falls” feel. The tracklist does feature great sonic variation, peppered not only with their default slices of seductively entrancing indie pop but also with notable classical and jazz textures, and with ambitious tracks like opener “Fables of the Silverlink” (its near nine-minute runtime the most expansive in The Clientele’s canon) coinciding with a host of spry little interludes which, if minimal in their impact, manage to balance out the weightier moments.
Despite the sprawling nature of the record, the standard of quality throughout is quite high. There are a number of vintage The Clientele “bangers” (such as they are), like the lush “Lady Grey”, which wouldn’t have been out of place as a highlight track from the
God Save The Clientele era, “Blue Over Blue”, maybe the catchiest tune here, and the graceful earworm “Claire’s Not Real”. Then there are a bunch of gentle and lyrically-focused tunes, like the remarkable “Chalk Flowers” (more on that later) and the mellow but deeply sad “Through The Roses”. Finally, there are also a plethora of songs which expand upon the band’s signature sound, like the aforementioned multi-segmented prog-esque “Fables of the Silverlink”, the unusually experimental “Dying in May”, or the spoken-word closer “The Village is Always on Fire”, whose instrumental features stand far from The Clientele’s typical rock/pop foundations.
I Am Not There Anymore does have its share of weaknesses too, broadly corresponding with the distinctive attributes which set it apart from the rest of the band’s oeuvre. For one thing, while the material is great, over an hour of music can be a slight strain on patience for a release by The Clientele (or most artists, really). For another, arguably not every track justifies inclusion, and one or two of the multitude of interludes (like “Conjuring Summer In” or “My Childhood”), or one of the less notable songs located on the back of the tracklist (like “Hey Siobhan” or “Stems of Anise”, pretty as they are) might’ve been removed without too much detriment. And, finally, this album’s more rigid conceptual nature presents its own challenges: with your typical The Clientele album, a general sense of sublime sadness pervades, to be filtered by the listener into whatever pathway feels most relevant. Here, the explicitly personal nature of the recurring references to the death of MacLean’s mother and other events of his bygone youth make the
vibe a bit less subtle and requires more commitment from the listener, even as it remains quite easy to get swept up by the mood of the pieces.
All told, taking the long view, it seems improbable that
I Am Not There Anymore will go down as The Clientele’s defining statement - releases like
Suburban Light and
The Violet Hour are simply too seminal in introducing the group’s brand of ethereal and atmospheric jams to be upstaged. But this is an admirable return for a veteran band, as they utilize their art to explore the emotions of ever-more faded younger days in ways which, any adult can tell you, are inherently very challenging - at best, you’re looking at the goings-on of the distant past through a prism, unable to fully recapture the feelings which have become rather alien through the turmoil of the intervening years. Whether The Clientele truly succeeded here in creating a musical piece capturing the emotional essence of a challenging but defining period in MacLean’s life is an open question - MacLean himself echoes these doubts when he muses about hazy school days at the end of “Fables of the Silverlink”, leaving us hanging by allowing the song’s final line to be an ambivalent “
I don’t know why”, but there’s a wonderful thoughtfulness and poignancy in the attempt all the same.
Discussing one of the highlights from the album’s second half, “Chalk Flowers”, feels like a fitting way to conclude the review. It’s a song full of incredible imagery, early on richly describing life as a contemplative kid in the English countryside: “
a horseman on a ridgeway, though he’s imaginary, but over to the west, a king sleeps in the hill”. Then, the narrator’s first love interest enters the picture: “
I took her to the cornfield, I took her to the greenwood, I took her to the places I had loved”, revealing a loss of childhood innocence. Soon after, this devastating couplet: “
the king’s sleep is unbroken, the hospice window’s open”, tying together the album’s themes of reaching adulthood and familial loss through profoundly personal fragmented memories. In the end, if MacLean can never go home again, as he mourns in “I Dreamed Of You, Maria”: “
but I could not find the place that I came from”, at least he has managed to bundle those convoluted feelings into an artistic creation well worth exploring. At once exquisitely beautiful and deeply tragic, and imbued with a bucolic sense of a rural England full of villages and country lanes and woods and fields,
I Am Not There Anymore is a journey that you won’t readily forget. Flaws and all, it’s both a worthy comeback for an excellent band and one of the year’s finest releases.
