It's a little difficult not to hum the melody to "Daydream Believer" during the opening of "Here Comes the Phantom", the first track from the Clientele's third full-length album. The chords bump against those of the Monkees classic without mimicking them precisely; it's not what is played that sounds so familiar, but how, as the piano moves with a whimsical bounce that evokes someone dancing in a brightly-lit studio with walls the color of a television's test pattern. And when Alasdair MacLean begins to sing, it's like all the rain that fell during the first 50 or so songs the Clientele recorded has finally given way to sunlight: "April in my mind, but I can't sleep/ So I took a walk around the trees/ And what did I see?/ Summer waits in the leaves/ As lovely as I've ever known." We hear of cops picking flowers while walking their beats and a heart that plays like a violin. We've been introduced to a new Clientele world. But it's not all golden shafts of light: "Happiness just comes and goes," MacLean sings to finish out the verse.
Listening to God Save the Clientele I keep thinking of how, through their first two albums, various EPs, and the godlike singles collection Suburban Light, the Clientele seemed defined by a certain kind of thoughtful stasis. They were the band that to casual observers sounded the same from track to track, employing a handful of production tricks and a slightly larger handful of lyrical themes to articulate a rich and complex world informed by magical realism, memory, and the ache of nostalgia. For good or ill, this uniformity seems to be slipping away. God Save the Clientele sounds like the work of the same band, but it shows them in a new, brighter light, broadened in both sound and outlook. In terms of sonics and tunes, these changes are welcome and logical, expanding upon the sound with which they made their name without sacrificing intimacy or risking coming across overcooked.
Most of these tracks were recorded by Lambchop's Mark Nevers at his Beech House studio in Nashville. Brian O'Shaughnessy, who worked on Strange Geometry, also recorded two numbers and mixed the lot. String arrangements-- and there are lots of them-- are again by Louis Philippe, the indie pop veteran with the golden ears. Suffice to say, God Save sounds warm, balanced, and absolutely gorgeous. Nevers' commitment to analog and his stated desire to recapture the depth of field of the finest recordings from the 1970s are matched well to the Clientele's classicist aesthetic. The range of guitar tones, along with tasteful use of orchestrations, piano, and pedal steel, has led to an album that sounds absurdly expensive and lush for an indie release.
The band's easy melodicism is intact. "Here Comes the Phantom" and "Bookshop Casanova" are the sort of peppy, tuneful pop that would have sounded odd coming from the Clientele five years ago. The latter has been remarked upon for its Beatles-referencing lyrics ("You've got my name/ Pick up my number/ Come on, darling/ Let's be lovers") and an overall mood that brings to mind the Fab Four (seems like there's probably a writer of paperbacks lurking somewhere in this particular shop). "Winter on Victoria Street" sounds like a Clientele title of old but it's another swinging track that, like "Bookshop", has lyrics that work the edge between longing and lust ("Watching a movie and getting bored/ Trying to get up with the girl next door"). "The Queen of Seville" might be the most beautiful ballad the band has recorded, with a Erik Satie-like piano line, acoustic guitar picking that oozes melancholy, and a radiant pedal steel that sounds dialed in from a rain-soaked countrypolitan dream.
Balancing its sonic pleasures, God Save is more difficult to get a handle on lyrically. Which is ironic, considering that MacLean's words now seem simpler, more direct, and ultimately more grounded in pop tradition. On early singles like "Reflections After Jane", MacLean's viewpoint seemed utterly strange and simultaneously familiar, like he was pointing out things we'd all noticed but no one had bothered to articulate. "On the bridge the workers pass in threes and fours and fives," he sang back then, and you could see those dudes in your mind, striding along with their lunch pails, and you knew it was important even if you weren't quite sure why. The instantly evocative couplets here are harder to find, and there are more references to a larger, more generalized big picture. Another of the album's stronger songs is titled "From Brighton Beach to Santa Monica", which is a whole lot of real estate, even if the verses are actually quite specific. ("Voices in the park following us down to Vincent Street/ Ghosts inside the yard, rattling their balls and chains.")
"The Dance of the Hours" sets prose to music, and the quickly whispered words are impossible to catch on record. Fortunately, they're included in the album's liners. The song's tale is quintessential Clientele, telling of a tiny knight found in a back garden by a child. It's the kind of story that could be covered in 10 words but MacLean takes a couple hundred anyway, teasing out every detail of the small figure's appearance ("I realize now that his delicate frame could only have been nourished by medieval foods: turnips, blood sausage, perhaps songbirds roasted in a thin, toxic sauce of mercury") and circumstances. That feeling of a banal moment being imbued with so much potential significance, if only one would only take the time to comb through it, is what the Clientele's music captures at its very best. God Save may not get there quite as often as Strange Geometry or the songs collected on Suburban Light, but it does so much else right such potential shortcomings are easy to set aside.
