Clientele - Lost Weekend

  by Scott Miller

published: 22 / 2 / 2002

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Review

This is exactly what the Clientele should be doing. Making mid-length EPs with great songs and their now unmistakable sound-or I should say ambience. I was beginning to worry that they were getting spread too thin, what with all the split 7"s, comp. appearances and their "LP" ('Suburban Light') which was really only three new songs and their out of print singles. It seemed like they were being distracted from sitting down and really perfecting the urban psychedelia they've been flirting with. The songs on the last few releases have been slightly aimless-with good ideas but lacking the hooks to take them to the next level. Druggy without the payoff. Perhaps you don't agree with me-but if you do, worry not. The 'Lost Weekend' EP is a beautiful, heady return to form. A 5 song EP based around 3 main songs, an ambient piece, and a sombre, atmospheric piano instrumental. It opens with the lazy groove of "North School Drive', a nice circular melody that has that defining Clientele mood which gives me the feeling that the song has been playing long before my speakers picked it up and continues long after. Exactly the sort of moment frozen-in-time quality that they seem to be mining. The short ambient piece that follows, entitled 'Boring Postcard', sounds like how traffic on a rainy day might sound while walking on psychedelics. Think of the cover to 'Suburban Light' and it really does come close to sounding how that picture looks. Fading in from the traffic is 'Emptily through Holloway'-the stretched out centre piece of the record, another one of the Clientele's songs that sounds as if it were written on a long walk spent reflecting back on the past weeks. Their recurring themes of rain, days of the week, glass and locales function more as images evoked from fading memories than anything specific. They colour the songs with the haze of memories and rarely tell a story-perhaps because there's no story to tell. In other words, the way many of us often feel. The simple and lazy drive of the drums is the key to their songs not wandering off into oblivion -instead anchoring them and helping the melodies come to the fore. Next , 'Kelvin Parade' offsets the record nicely by being upbeat but still unrushed (The Clientele are masters of this)-almost reminiscent of a druggy Tommy Roe or some other 60's breeziness. More structured and less locked in to their trademark groove, it still sounds completely in place. 'Last Orders', a short piano piece, fades the record out perfectly leaving it to float about in space until we tune in again on our magic transistor radios to the reverberating timelessness that is the Clientele.

Track Listing:-

1 North School Drive
2 Boring Postcards
3 Emptily through Holloway
4 Kelvin Parade
5 Last Orders

Band Links:-

http://www.theclientele.co.uk/
https://www.facebook.com/theclienteleo
https://twitter.com/theclientele
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Clie