Feeling Lonely

Man, what a beautiful album.

I can’t remember how I first came across the Clientele, but the first song of theirs I heard was “Saturday.” Even today it’s one of my favorites from the band. Wanting to make it legitimate and own the song on a CD, I ultimately picked up Suburban Light, a compilation of singles etc., directly from Merge; I decided that while I was at it I’d buy another CD and ordered Distant Plastic Trees/The Wayward Bus on the single-disc reissue (so as to legitimatize my copy of “100,000 Fireflies,” another wonderful track). I fell hard for Clientele afterward, and Strange Geometry was great like their earlier stuff except it sounded good: an instance in which better production helped the band. Naturally there was nothing wrong with their earlier work’s fidelity. I found it very charming. I asked a couple friends when they thought “Saturday” was recorded and they all figured it was a 60s 45rpm single, maybe. Anyway, about the new album: what a stellar band. What a sound. Their uptempo numbers are great, their downtempo numbers are great. I’m a sucker for steel guitar (and handclaps, and guiro, and rock organ) and its entrance on “The Queen of Seville” is killer, and its appearance a track later on “These Days Nothing But Sunshine” is as beautiful as anything.

Then, it’s unusual for my first post here to be about an album released fully a month ago. Usually we get stuff anywhere between a few days after the release, to (usually) a few days or a week before its release, to (less commonly) weeks before the release. But due to circumstances it didn’t get in my hands until yesterday. So it goes. Great album, though. Props to Lindsey from the label for getting it to me.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, June 5th, 2007 at 7:07 pm and is filed under job, music. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.