The Clientele – Alone & Unreal: The Best Of The Clientele

A shimmering surface, but much more beneath...

Like Galaxie 500 before them and Beach House in the present, The Clientele have perpetually – and unjustly – been tagged with one the laziest, most trite of critical platitudes: the one-trick band.

While that label really is rather ill fitting, the career-spanning retrospective 'Alone and Unreal: The Best of the Clientele' serves as a potent reminder of just how discreetly revelatory the group's primary method of operation has always been. Generally, the music collected here expands upon the moodier, more ethereal side of '60s psych-pop greats (The Beatles, The Kinks, The Zombies, Love, etc.). By honing in on the arcane aspects of their unimpeachable influences, The Clientele arrived at a sound that remains deeply comforting in its familiarity yet continuously engrossing because of its manifold mysteries. Though it could be argued that this hypnotic band was in some ways the product of a post-slowcore/shoegaze era, their output retains a kind of purity because it was largely undiluted by indie norms of the '90s and 2000s.

The first side of 'Alone and Unreal' is indeed a peerless run of soft-focus, paisley-hued dream pop, though the second half of this collection will perhaps help dispel the notion that The Clientele were averse to experimenting with their formula. A disco pulse enlivens the swooning, introverts-only come-on 'Bookshop Casanova'; the Lennon-esque 'Harvest Time' is a bewitching countryside gothic; and 'Losing Haringey' represents The Clientele's very own entry into the lysergic spoken word sub-genre, a tradition of trippy short stories set to music that can be traced directly back to The Velvet Underground's 'The Gift.' Yet even the band's signature soft-psych pearls are not without their gambles, as proven by the show-stopping 'Since K Got Over Me', which effortlessly lifts a twinkling melody from The Crystals' 'Then He Kissed Me'.

Of course, with just eleven selections to 'Alone and Unreal', there are a number of casualties – some of the finest early singles are sorely missed, there's but one cut from the undervalued 'The Violet Hour' LP, and the band's EPs and mini-albums are completely ignored. Additionally, while the baroque 'On a Summer Trail' is presumably the "new song" referred to in accompanying press notes, the faithful will probably have noted that it quietly surfaced as a single back in 2014.

More pressing, perhaps, is that the very notion of a "best of" release is seemingly at odds with a band that treated sustained atmosphere like a hallowed pursuit. But similar to 'Suburban Light', the 2000 singles compilation that first drew many to The Clientele, 'Alone and Unreal' is remarkably cohesive, and it would hardly be surprising if the uninitiated were to mistake this for a proper studio full-length rather than the patchwork it is. Though it covers a period of 15 years (1999 to 2014), the entire album is unwaveringly nostalgic and melancholic, suburban in its mellowness, but attuned to a pastoral speed of life.

Ideally, this set will serve a purpose similar to 'Suburban Light'; namely, to introduce a generation of listeners to one of the most sublime guitar pop bands to have graced the turn of the Millennium.

8/10

Words: Michael Wojtas

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