A Chord Behind Another Chord, That is Not Played: A Review of I Am Not There Anymore by The Clientele

By Berlinda Recacho

The Clientele have an enigmatic relationship with time. Their retro approach is so convincing I still sometimes wonder when I first heard them. Did I discover the cheeky swagger of "Bookshop Casanova" from God Save the Clientele! when it debuted in 2005, or do I have memories of listening to it years earlier? Haven't I always hummed along to the maudlin hush of "Saturday" from 2000's Suburban Light? And have six years really passed since The Age of Miracles' earworm "Lunar Days"? Lead singer and guitarist Alasdair MacLean's voice has the timbre equivalent of crushed velvet -- he sounds like The British Invasion beamed into the future, reliving its collective youth on the plush stage of a late-night lounge. The trio of MacLean, drummer Mark Keen, and bassist James Hornsey are adept at conjuring up aural environments, whether these have actual coordinates in the physical world or are instead rooted in memory. But in their new album I Am Not There Anymore, a singular event -- the loss of MacLean's mother in 1997 -- takes center stage, becoming the point that all the songs gravitate toward and radiate from. While the track listing is one short of 20 songs, the running time is just over an hour. Aside from "Fables of the Silverlink", an eight-minute opus that serves as a trailer foreshadowing the musical themes to come, most of the tracks run the typical three to four minutes each. A series of short musical interludes (labeled "Segues" and "Radials") fill the spaces inbetween with beguiling samples of birdsong and music-box chimes alongside chords and notes. You may be tempted to bypass these interludes and skip to the catchy singles "Claire's Not Real" and "Blue over Blue" amid the reverie. But if you listen to I Am Not There Anymore all the way through, in order, you will be rewarded with a mysterious soundtrack so poignant and lush with detail, it relinquishes the need for a corresponding movie.

These songs meander through stream-of-consciousness, often referencing each other, dropping in and out of time, coming back full circle to the present as a landing strip to observe the past. "Maria" haunts the song cycle, shadowed by "Kathleen", and these names are called upon, acknowledged, appealed to, and invoked. City kids light evening fires in dry grass under conditions of high winds. They run through gardens at night on scavenger hunts searching for the hare in the moon, mauve reflected in a river, mummified rain, and the news of travelers who see nothing, among other ghostly bits of flotsam and jetsam. The month of May and the 15th of August become as infamous as "The Ides of March". When set to different tempos and treatments. borrowed snippets and collaged phrases are completely transformed. In "Garden Eye Mantra", the "spinny-blue sky" complements the scratchy sound of backyard insects on a lazy summer afternoon -- then the song hits a flat discordant note and swerves into a monotonous chant meant to ward off an entity watching and waiting in the dark. In "I Dreamed of You, Maria", that same foreboding chant morphs into a lullaby gently heralded by trumpet fanfare. The narrator of "My Childhood" speaks as clearly as a tour guide, in a tone so neutral, you wonder if she's even real. The song unfolds like an avant-garde performance: a dissonant string quartet keeping time as a carousel clicks through slides that define a particular childhood through mysterious images ("a chord played behind another chord that is not played") and nightmarish visions ("a statue in an Italian Garden growing horns and coming to life"). "Dying in May" revisits themes from "Fables of the Silverlink" and layers them over emotional entreaties in a snare-driven march serenaded by strings. The "Childhood" narrator makes another appearance in "Conjuring Summer In" by reading cryptic observations from a dream journal, that are just barely discernible under a repeated chord progression on the piano. She closes out the album with "The Village is Always on Fire" reciting the "Childhood" inventory over "Silverlink"'s instrumentation, slower and stripped down to drum, bass, and cello.

While time keeps moving in the physical world, it stands still, transfixed in your head. Even after 30 years grief doesn’t dissipate completely; it shapeshifts into different modes of expression. Mourning is both the most private of events and a shared public ritual. Loss upends the idea of childhood, haunts the spaces, and reassembles the pieces of life in a familiar -- though not identical -- configuration. Memories are the most pristine when we lock them away like artifacts. If we pull them out to relive them, they are rendered less accurate, but far more compelling. Maybe music is the only way to talk about these ineffable and inevitable things? As MacLean recalls in "Lady Grey", "My mother told me how to die/It's like playing hide and seek." The game is far more complicated for the seekers, as detailed in "Chalk Flowers": "And when I came back home/somebody'd left the lights on/and all that I am is changed." A stubborn logic persists in "I Dreamed of You, Maria" -- could it be called faith?: "Walking home when the movie ends where the bindweed/ flowers up/and down the chain link fence/I'll see you around/I'll see you around."

These myths and legends, ghost stories, and fairy tales of childhood subvert and coalesce with mortality and impermanence, creating a sort of magical realism that drives the narrative. MacLean explains, "Something that stays with you as an image becomes almost a symbol of something else. But you describe the image because you can't describe the something else." Perhaps these lines from "Claire's Not Real" best capture the album's essence: "And sometimes I'm walking home/At my door/I am not there anymore/I am not there anymore/Do you know what I mean?/Is the dream hard to share?" This feeling mirrors the frustration and wonder of writing this review because I can't completely transcribe what it feels like to experience this strange, amazing, difficult, beautiful piece of art. So you should just clear sixty-three minutes on your schedule to sit down and listen to it yourself. If you're like me, you'll listen to it again and again, so much that it will be like the soundtrack to your own life and you won't remember what you were like or who you were before you heard it.

I Am Not There Anymore by The Clientele is out tomorrow via Merge.

[Photo: Andy Willsher]