Fri Jan 07
Rain 55°/49° 80 %
Sat Jan 08
Rain 54°/50° 90 %
Sun Jan 09
Rain 56°/51° 90 %
Mon Jan 10
Rain 55°/45° 70 %
Yuck. On that note, I would like to push my favorite record to listen to during rainy days and quiet Sunday mornings.
The Clientele, Suburban Light [Merge 2000]
Gorgeous songs that recall the quieter moments of the Velvet Underground and Felt. A must-have.
allmusic says:
Even as the Clientele's hazy, soft-focus pop suggests the influence of virtually every musical ancestor worth acknowledging, the band's pastoral beauty nevertheless conjures a dreamscape entirely its own; fusing the heady otherness of psychedelia with the gentle caress of folk, Suburban Light swirls and settles like gold dust. Like the artist Joseph Cornell, the titular subject of one of the disc's most memorable songs, the Clientele assemble and juxtapose found fragments (collected from forebears like Love, Nick Drake, and Donovan) and transform their source materials into something magical and new; although the record's 13 cuts assemble various singles and scattered recordings, the finished product hangs together with a clear sense of purpose and scope. Over repeated listens, the songs grow both more distinctive and more interconnected, boasting a richly nuanced intricacy as intoxicating as it is elusive.And maybe you should read this Boston Globe piece, which begins:
It always seems to be raining softly inside a song by the Clientele. A shaft or two of amber light may slant across a verse or a melody and linger for a moment, but what scant sun peeks through the British band's melancholic skies usually precedes the next inevitable poetic downpour. The cumulative sensory effect -- a sort of saturnine, wistful ache that suffuses the music -- makes the Clientele singer-guitarist Alasdair MacLean very happy. He enjoys, he says, capturing "that feeling of things slipping past."Buy it.
