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Album reviews Music

The Clientele

Rating: NNNN



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Like Richard Hawley’s Lowedges, the Clientele’s Strange Geometry is an album determined to take the listener back in time through well-placed sonic signifiers, but it’s a credit to the London-based band’s skilled subtlety that their music doesn’t just feel like a retro rehash. Instead, they take influences from the psych-pop past (Love, the Byrds), filter those through a shoegazer frame and add lyrics that are keen and literate. Part of the trick is the swelling, stately string arrangements by Louis Philippe, which have a Warren and Dubin quality, as though lifted from the ballroom scene in a 50s movie. Every guitar note and vocal phrase is coated in a sheen of reverb that, oddly, never feels excessive. They even get away with cribbing the hook from Then He Kissed Me on post-breakup ballad Since K Got Over Me, folding that into a haze of shimmering guitars and downer lyrics that perfectly capture wandering through suburban neighbourhoods in a heartsick daze.

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