The Clientele
London trio The Clientele announce new album, "I Am Not There Anymore", due for release on 28th July via Merge, and share winsome first single from the album, “Blue Over Blue.”
Photo Credit: Andy Willsher
Announcing their first album since 2017’s "Music for the Age of Miracles", work initially began on "I Am Not There Anymore" in 2019 and continuing until 2022 in part due to the pandemic and also because the band wanted the space to experiment. “We’d always been interested in music other than guitar music, like for donkey’s years,” vocalist/lyricist/guitarist Alasdair MacLean says. This time out alongside bassist James Hornsey and drummer Mark Keen incorporated elements of post-bop jazz, contemporary classical and electronic music. which MacLean notes, “None of those things had been able to find their way into our sound other than in the most passing way, in the faintest imprint.”
This method which MacLean calls “a leap forwards and to the side” is evident on the albums first single “Blue Over Blue,” with percussive samples and shift in arrangement incorporating horns and strings. “What happened with this record was that we bought a computer,” MacLean comments. Throughout the process of recording the new album the band would lay down a few tracks and then take them home to play around, trying out different arrangements before returning to the studio to finish recording all the little instrumental enhancements.
Commenting on the albums first single “Blue Over Blue” MacLean explains: “‘Blue Over Blue’ is about getting lost in the woods on Hampstead Heath on an autumn day with my two-year-old son on my shoulders - he loved it and wanted to play hide and seek. I knew he was a ticking time bomb as I had no food with me and was trying to find my way back to a path.”
Spanning 19-tracks "I Am Not There Anymore" is a journey that moves from light bossa nova beats to the Clientele’s classic chamber pop, with Keen’s live drums weaving around programmed drum and bass samples to create something polyrhythmic and avant-garde. While Keen is also responsible for the spare and instrumental interstitials that appear throughout the album all called “Radials,” as in “the spokes from the center of the wheel.” They “change the focus in between songs,” according to MacLean. “Without those tracks, everything might be a bit too heavy. They make you look away for a little while so you can look back again later.” There’s a similar purpose to the cover image, taken from the 1823 Kameda Bōsai painting Long Life. It’s both a beautiful piece of abstract art and a poem about, in MacLean’s words, “the distance and surprise of getting older.” Expanding on this idea MacLean says, "I Am Not There Anymore" is all about “the memory of childhood but at the same time the impossibility of truly remembering childhood… or even knowing who or what you are.”
PRE-ORDER "I AM NOT THERE ANYMORE" HERE.
