In the late 1990s, an English band called the Clientele began to put out 7" singles on small labels like Pointy and Motorway and Elefant. The songs, mostly written by leader Alasdair MacLean, sounded as though they were recorded inexpensively but they didn’t sound careless; with rich, heavy reverb and careful arrangements, they had the whiff of a band with big ideas who didn’t yet have the resources to realize them. And so, instead, they huddled together in a rented room somewhere, turned on the tape machine, and created a world as best they could.
Suburban Light, the first full-length by the Clientele, initially released in late 2000, gathered these early singles and some other stray tracks. It was a modest record that developed a small cult, one that would grow a little bit with each new Clientele record through the last decade. While the group always had a very specific and identifiable aesthetic, they never quite sounded like this again, if only because, once they were signed to labels and putting out albums, they began to record in proper studios. But while Suburban Light is a special record, it’s not surprising that, for many, it flew under the radar. For one, its core musical idea—guitar-centric indie pop enamored with the gently psychedelic 1960s (deep Beatles cuts, Donovan, Kinks, West Coast Pop Art Experimental Band) and the UK indie pop of the ’80s (Felt, Television Personalities)—isn’t exactly novel. It’s not hard to imagine hearing these songs casually and thinking “Sounds nice enough” and then moving on to something more immediately distinctive. But those who stop there are really missing out; Suburban Light is a very unusual record in its way, a perfectly realized amalgam of time, place, sound, and subject matter.
Clues to its enduring appeal can be found in its most immediately noticeable quality: the relentless repetition of a small handful of themes. Almost every song here mentions rain, and two do so in the titles; there are references to stars and eyes and gardens and light and leaves and silent motorways—elemental tools for building intimate pop songs. But instead of worrying about redundancy, Alasdair embraces the recurring images, and the cumulative effect over the course of the record is that the record feels very much like a specific place, somewhere you visit rather than something you listen in on. This, combined with the album’s rich, heavily reverbed sound, makes Suburban Light feel unusually enveloping.
MacLean has always been open about his influences: surrealist poetry, found-object art, the fathoms-deep atmosphere of Galaxie 500. From the surrealists he learned a rich vividness with language; lines like “Bicycles have drifted through these leaves still wet with rain” (from “Bicycles”) and “6 am in morningside, the first car rushes by/ We walk down to the garden and the sunlight fills your eyes” (from “6am Morningside”, included in the U.S. version of Suburban Light and here on the bonus disc) have an uncanny ability to put pictures in your head. Suburban Light is filled with such couplets, lines dripping with romantic yearning for something just out of reach paired with nostalgia for something slipping from memory. The freighted imagery inflates mundane objects and situations into impossibly grand tableaus; these songs invite you to look a little more deeply at your surroundings, to see how a few workers walking over a bridge at dawn might be connected to your own sense of dislocation.
Indeed, Suburban Light evokes a lonely world. One of the reasons the record sounds so dreamlike is that the narrator is completely in his own head; he wanders lamp-lit streets and sees a carnival crowd dispersing but feels a million miles away. The scenes describing human contact seem to happen more in imagination than reality. So in addition to romanticizing the mundane, Suburban Light also makes moving through the world in solitude and observing it carefully seem like a state of grace.
Driving home all these quiet scenes and minute observations is music that is unfailingly gorgeous. MacLean is an inventive guitar player and he sings with real emotion, and he also has the songwriting chops to hang with his earlier pop heroes. Part of why Suburban Light feels so bound to memory is because the constructions of the songs hearkens back to an age when the right chord change, when paired with the precise melodic turn, counted for everything. The songs seem old in part because their melodic conception is from another era, one when competition for penning tunes was thick. And the extreme reverb, sometimes reminiscent of the ghost halo of echo surrounding voices in the Flamingos' “I Only Have Eyes for You”, evokes a particular era of radio, one we know now only filtered through many generations of media.
One of Suburban Light’s paradoxical qualities is that it’s not afraid of boredom. Because of its golden AM sonics, Suburban Light always exists on one level as ambiance, the kind of mildly bland prettiness you hear leaking from a beat-up transistor set to an oldies station. That quality, of past and present and foreground and background all existing at the same time, makes me think of a certain strand of atmospheric electronic music. MacLean has expressed great admiration for the music of Boards of Canada, but Suburban Light seems spiritually akin to something like An Empty Bliss Beyond This World by the Caretaker, the way it creates a stirring atmosphere that’s unsettling in its surface beauty while containing layers of deeper meaning. On the Clientele’s Lost Weekend, which contains tracks recorded around the same time as some of the songs here, there’s a brief sound collage with street noise called “Boring Postcard”. The title is a reference to Martin Parr’s book of the same name, which presents selections from his collection of postcards gathered over the years, without comment. The book features ancient snapshots of roads and banks and hotel lobbies, most of which are eerily empty; Clientele songs could be set in these places.
And now, thanks to Merge’s 25th anniversary reissue program, Suburban Light is back in print on vinyl, where it belongs. The bonus disc included here is universally excellent, and includes the tracks that were on the American version of Suburban Light as well as a few other singles that could have been on the record proper. It’s the definitive statement of early Clientele, and it underscores the kind of subtle brilliance this band was capable of. Suburban Light is ultimately about a particular way of seeing, of looking at your life from the outside while living inside of it, romanticizing events as they happen. All of which connects it firmly to the mindset of youth and young adulthood, when you’re straddling the space between hazy childhood and the uncertain future, inhabiting a world so lovely and unreal.
