Alasdair MacLean closes Music for the Age of Miracles with what can be called a confession: “Lately I’ve been living like I’m so far away/Like I’m somebody else, in some other place,” he sings during the chorus of the record’s last and best song, “The Age of Miracles,” a beautiful reflection on adjusting to the effects of age and the arc of time. MacLean’s voice peaks just past its usual reverb-trailed whisper, a bit of urgency suggesting he’s now got something to do, somewhere to be. It is a moment of sudden self-recognition on the first full album from his softly psychedelic British band the Clientele in seven years, an act of blinking awake after a late-afternoon nap or an idle year in comfort and complacency. And it is, unfortunately, an apt analogy for most of Miracles, a twelve-track exercise in mannerism that omits an essential element of what long made the Clientele so captivating. His wake-up call from pleasantry arrives too late to make much of Miracles.
For a few years, the Clientele seemed to be finished. In the summer of 2011, they announced an indefinite hiatus, nearly two years after releasing Bonfires on the Heath, an exquisite record that would have bid an appropriate adieu. But over the next several years, occasional shows, a batch of odds-and-ends, a reissue, and sporadic singles burbled up. The Clientele, it seemed, had simply shifted to a secondary concern for MacLean, who turned his attention to a beguiling nylon-stringed duo called Amor de Días.
During the break, the Clientele seems to have grown or evolved very little. Many of the trademarks that earned the band a cult following remain for Miracles: MacLean is still a wonderfully ponderous lyricist, capturing scenes of sylvan twilight and urban ennui with a painter’s eye for detail and a novelist’s knack for symbolism. And he delivers them in a wonderfully reverb-dressed voice, which seems always to sigh out his secrets. The rhythm section—bassist James Hornsey and drummer Mark Keen—remains one of indie rock’s most subtly brilliant supports, with small, tricky shifts in time and tone that test the structural limits of the twinkling tunes they shape.
For the Clientele’s return, however, MacLean favors his new nylon-stringed instrument to its electric predecessor, picking out pretty, luxuriant lines from start to finish. At their best, the Clientele’s twinkling songs countered austere beauty with gripping tension, be it an electric guitar that jolted the soft landscape or a hiss of dissonance that introduced welcome frisson. But here, they just add layer after layer of lovely, from strings and horns and harmonies to Mary Lattimore’s percolating harp or the low-focus vocals of MacLean’s Amor de Días partner, Lupe Núñez-Fernández. Most any loudness, dissonance, or abrasion is a feint, a bump that’s apologized for with a quick retreat toward the baseline. “The Neighbour,” “Falling Asleep,” “Everyone You Meet”: The bulk of Music for the Age of Miracles is simply evidence that the Clientele can still sound like the Clientele, albeit one tempered and softened by age. This is a pair of old slacks, slipped on for a lazy Sunday afternoon.
There are moments buried within these dozen tracks that suggest that this needn’t be the Clientele’s end, that intriguing ideas and directions still linger at the core trio’s periphery. “The Circus,” for instance, hints at the sort of pastoral unease Pentangle pioneered nearly half a century ago, with riverine acoustic guitar and prismatic harmonies conjuring their British predecessor’s haunted atmospherics. And during “Everything You See Tonight Is Different from Itself,” they make a concession to the changes that have come to its own genre since its last album. MacLean first sings above gently backlit electronics, his voice floating and then flying above the beat. This is the most complicated, amorphous, and loud track on the record, swelling and receding and altogether surprising. It’s the sound of a band still trying to define its sound after nearly a quarter-century. But on a record that feels largely redundant and listless, no matter how welcome the Clientele’s return may seem, it is pure anomaly.
For years, the Clientele has been concerned with time, the shifting of the seasons, and the ways in which people become shadows or mutations of their former selves. A de facto reunion album on which they appear somehow reduced by time seems inevitable and appropriate, then, a linear if lamentable and ironic progression. In essence, they’ve left something behind in the quest to recapture the Clientele. It is the sort of scenario MacLean might document in one of the spoken-word tone poems that often mark the back half of Clientele albums. During the waltzing “The Museum of Fog,” he even describes a night of lonely drinking in which he finds himself in a rock club, watching a mysterious rock band that conjures the sound and energy and ambition of his sixteen-year-old self. He tries to track down the masked singer, only to see him slip away in a crowded car of kids. “I stood in the night,” MacLean says solemnly at the end, “and I wondered what had been taken from me.” You can hear him chasing and missing that same spirit during Music for the Age of Miracles. At least he sounds good doing it.
