All of the Clientele's records have been of a piece since at least 2003's The Violet Hour, when the Brit band began to move away from the vocal-smearing reverb and budget-conscious production values of their early singles in search of something brighter, more classically pop. On 2005's Strange Geometry, they shifted focus for real, looking to the rich analog sound of the 1960s rather than the scrappy 1980s indie pop that reared them (which was of course already pretty 60s-indebted).
The Clientele are too idiosyncratic to be a straight retro act-- one listen to Alasdair MacLean's sighing delivery and you know he's not out to imitate Lennon, McCartney, anyone-- but that same strong stamp of personality means it's hard to say anything new about the band. So yes, on Minotaur they continue draw deeply from 60s soft-pop; if you've enjoyed the Clientele's last few albums, you're guaranteed to enjoy at least 6/8ths of this mini LP. It's the same gorgeous, heartsick-sounding, consciously nostalgic, folk-ish rock you can imagine jangling from some shy bookworm's transistor radio in the brief period between Rubber Soul and the Summer of Love. On the plus side, the band has ditched the ersatz Brit Invasion touches that marred 2009's Bonfires on the Heath. The Clientele, despite their unfair reputation as a one-trick band, can do many things well, but they just sound off when they go up-tempo.
But Minotaur also includes the first Clientele song you could actually describe as "creepy." There's a brief piano instrumental-- somewhere between Vangelis doing a slow-mo Chariots of Fire and Komeda's Rosemary's Baby incidentals-- that hints at said creepiness. But it's "The Green Man"-- a spoken-word track, MacLean's twist on the "Green Man" tradition of classic Brit ghost stories, that takes off from the far sunnier "Losing Haringey" on Geometry-- that sounds very little like anything the Clientele have released so far. The backing track is almost musique concrète, a wash of eerie drones, distant footfalls, and industrial sounds, as if it were recorded from a subway platform at 3 a.m. Musically, "The Green Man" is more akin to late-period Coil than anything you'd find on a Time Life "sounds of the 60s" collection, and while it's probably a one-off experiment for the band, it also suggests that a little darkness might add a new (if not really necessary) dimension to the Clientele's sound.
