On July 28, 2023, Merge Records will release I Am Not There Anymore, The Clientele’s first new record in six years. Over The Clientele’s 32-year career, critics and fans have described their songs with words like “ethereal,” “shimmering,” “hazy,” “pretty,” and “fragile.” Their singer, guitarist, and lyricist, Alasdair MacLean, has his own interpretation of the effect his music creates. “It’s that feeling of not being there,” he says. “What’s really been in all the Clientele records is a sense of not actually inhabiting the moment your body is in.”

I Am Not There Anymore, regularly evokes what MacLean calls “the feeling of not being real.” Many of the songs were inspired by MacLean’s memories of the early summer in 1997, when his mother died, but also represent The Clientele pushing towards a new sonic frontier as a band, experimenting over the course of a three-year recording period.

Of this stretching out, MacLean says, “We’d always been interested in music other than guitar music, like for donkey’s years.” This time out, he and bassist James Hornsey and drummer Mark Keen incorporated elements of post-bop jazz, contemporary classical, and electronic music. According to MacLean, “None of those things had found their way into our sound other than in the most passing way, in the faintest imprint.”

With those elements in the foreground, I Am Not There Anymore reasserts The Clientele’s standing among the great stylists of pop music, deftly shifting from image to image, mood to mood, in a way that feels both new and classically them.

STAFF COMMENTS

Barry says: Swimming melodies and folky melodies soar around a solid base of grooving jazzy percussion and hazy psychedelic saturation. The Clientele have managed to craft something that's both innovative and without sacrificing their core melodic sound. A grander, more flowery Clientele and all the better for it.

TRACK LISTING

Side A
1 Fables Of The Silverlink
2 Radial B
3 Garden Eye Mantra
4 Segue 4 (iv)
5 Lady Grey
Side B
6 Dying In May
7 Conjuring Summer In
8 Radial C (Nocturne For Three Trees)
9 Blue Over Blue
10 Radial E
Side C
11 Claire's Not Real
12 My Childhood
13 Chalk Flowers
14 Radial H
15 Hey Siobhan
Side D
16 Stems Of Anise
17 Through The Roses
18 I Dreamed Of You, Maria
19 The Village Is Always On Fire

The Clientele return in September with Music for the Age of Miracles, their first release of new music since 2010's Minotaur EP and their first album on Tapete Records.

After The Clientele released Minotaur, Alasdair MacLean, singer and principal songwriter for the band, made two wonderful albums with Lupe Núñez-Fernández as Amor de Días, issued a Clientele best-of called Alone and Unreal, oversaw reissues of Suburban Light and Strange Geometry, and played shows solo or as part of Amor de Días or The Clientele. He and Lupe have also been raising a family, so the prospect of a new Clientele record seemed to be diminishing.

It seems fitting, then, that a chance meeting with a ghost from the past/future is what led to Music for the Age of Miracles, the first album of new Clientele songs in seven years.

MacLean and Anthony Harmer knew one another and played music together in the mid-1990s but had lost touch. "I had often wondered what had happened to Anthony since," writes MacLean. "It turned out-he told me-he'd studied the Santoor, an Iranian version of the dulcimer, and over decades become a virtuoso, at least by my standards. He suggested we have a jam together. Ant and I now lived three streets away from each other, it turned out. He started to arrange my songs. He let me write and sing them, and he came up with ideas for how they should sound. This carried on until we had an album. I called up James and Mark and asked them if they wanted to make another Clientele record. They did, and this is it."

So, a new collaboration with an old acquaintance led to a new Clientele album. On Music for the Age of Miracles, Harmer joins the line-up of MacLean, James Hornsey (bass), and Mark Keen (drums, piano, percussion), contributing string and brass arrangements as well as guitars, vocals, keyboards, saz and, yes, Santoor.

There's something rapturous about the ways in which tracks on side one such as "Falling Asleep" (featuring the Santoor) and the exquisite "Everything You See Tonight Is Different From Itself" stretch out in choral harmony and rhythmic syncopation. Leon Beckenham's trumpet solo on the latter is a highlight of the record, as is the way the words "ballerina, breathe" reappear at the three-minute mark. Similarly, Keen's beautifully evocative interludes "Lyra in April," "Lyra in October," and "North Circular Days," the last of these featuring a recording of the wind captured outside the late filmmaker Derek Jarman's house in Dungeness on the Kent coast, mean this album sounds subtly but significantly different from previous ones.

Birth, rebirth, the ghost in the trees, something on the edge of sight, the faces we love, childhood, parenthood, the dance of our days; music for the age of miracles, indeed.

TRACK LISTING

1.The Neighbour
2.Lyra In April
3.Lunar Days
4.Falling Asleep
5.Everything You See Tonight Is Different From Itself
6.Lyra In October
7.Everyone You Meet
8.The Circus
9.Constellations Echo Lanes
10.The Museum Of Fog
11.North Circular Days
12.The Age Of Miracles

The Clientele first formed in the early 1990s in the backwoods of suburban Hampshire, playing together as kids at school remote from any kind of music scene, but hypnotized 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 that 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 (Lambchop), 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".

Released to rave reviews in the UK and the US, their final album 'Bonfires on the Heath' was in a sense a return to the Clientele's roots; the dreamlike suburban landscapes first encountered in the early singles, their trippy sense of menace stronger. Instantly identifiable the clientele sound like no one else - although they are cited as an influence by contemporary bands as diverse as the War on Drugs, Panda Bear and the Fleet Foxes.

The Clientele release 'Alone & Unreal: The Best Of The Clientele' on Pointy Records. The compilation album features tracks from each of their previous 5 albums plus one new song. Both the LP and CD versions also include a bonus download of 'lost' clientele album 'The Sound Of Young Basingstoke' a previously unreleased live session from an early incarnation of the band.