Clientele - Alone and Unreal: The Best of the Clientele

  by Tommy Gunnarsson

published: 8 / 9 / 2015

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Review

It's not very common for indie-pop bands (if you could call the Clientele that, I'm not so sure) to be compiled on ’Greatest hits’ or ’best of” packages. Not even the giants of the scene, like Belle & Sebastian, have achieved that. But now London trio the Clientele (once also a quartet, first in their original line-up with Innes Phillips, and then later on when the line-up was extended by violinist and keyboard player Mel Draisey for a couple of years) gets the ’best of’ treatment on this single disc compilation called ’Alone and Unreal’. The songs picked here are some of the classic Clientele tunes, like the early ’We Could Walk Together’ and ’Reflections after Jane’, the mid-period ’Bookshop Casanova” and the latter ’Harvest Time’. Compilations like these can't be complete because you always miss some songs if like me you're a long-time fan. I would, for instance, include the fantastic ’Saturday’ and the old live favourite ’Jerry’ (finally recorded on their last mini-album ’Minotaur’). As band leader Alasdair MacLean has also told me in an interview, this compilation would be very different if they had picked the band member's own favourites. But as an introduction to this fabulous band, this is a great album, and when you buy a copy, you are treated to an extra bonus, consisting of a ”lost album”, recorded by the original line-up of the band. The Clientele deserves to be discovered by the masses, and this is a great starting point!

Track Listing:-

1 Reflections After Jane
2 We Could Walk Together
3 Missing
4 Since K Got over Me
5 (I Can't Seem To) Make You Mine
6 Losing Haringey
7 Bookshop Casanova
8 The Queen of Seville
9 Never Anyone but You
10 Harvest Time
11 On a Summer Trail
12 The Evening in Your Eyes
13 Saturday
14 Sweeten Your Eyes
15 Southern Way
16 Rain
17 When She's Tired of Dancing
18 Places out of Mind
19 6am Morningside
20 Wintertime
21 From a Window

Band Links:-

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

Label Links:-

http://www.pointyrecords.co.uk/