This was supposed to be a weekly column, Friday Morning Rhapsodic, to demonstrate to our readers the depths of my otherwise-hidden sentimentality; I had planned to post just one ditty a week, on Fridays, so as to not overwhelm our dear readers with the sort of sap I normally reserve for my repeated viewings of The English Patient. (Yeah, I don't get me either.) But then last night I was having some wine with my old bartender friend IB (whom I lovingly refer to as my sixth favorite Welshman), and several glasses of wine into the evening, the conversation turned to music -- and how easily the right song can turn one's day around. And that got me thinking about the Clientele, whom I recently had the chance to see at the Bowery Ballroom, in a set that was just about as perfect as could be. I think I'm still riding a high from that show. And so now, dear readers, you get my sap a couple of days early. I remember the first time I heard the Clientele. I was living here in the city the summer after my first year in Ithaca, and over on Eldridge Street there used to be a little record store that I go to every now and then, Sound and Fury (alas, it no longer exists). One afternoon I wandered in there, and this absolutely lovely song was playing. Whispery vocals, shimmering guitars, and just a strangely comforting feeling of not-quite-thereness. Just a wonderful, hushed sense of longing. I bought their EP, A Fading Summer, on the spot. It's been love ever since. That I've since spent some time with Alasdair Maclean, the frontman for the band, only confirms what their music suggests: they're a bunch of really great individuals who love making some of the saddest, most elegiacally big-hearted music I've ever heard. "Saturday," the song I first heard at Sound and Fury, remains my favorite; despite its bittersweet convergence of memory, hope, and longing, there's still something wonderfully un-bitter and very sweet about it. And heck, it's a much more age- and culturally- appropriate vehicle on which to float my sentimentality than, say, Ralph Fiennes.
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9 comments:
lauren, my friend who we had drinks once at the levee with and argued about the "originality" of the shins, is a big fan. hi fives for your prolificness.
clientele is cuntmusic for people who are already so dead they can't tell the difference between jerked-off cum and the real deal. and when i say they're dead, i mean they're little scumbubbles floating on the surface of the broth of life. People who are so divorced from things of any real meaning, that they easily slip into that drunken state of appeasement with their own microuniverse, totally afraid, and secretly gleeful that they'll never, ever be forced to consider anything other than what's right in front of them.
Ten years from now, the clientele will be, at best, a scar on music history memorializing some putrid, incidental disease acquired by accident long, long ago.
Fucking terrible music.
What I love most about Anonymous' comment is the way that it's so specific to the Clientele's music. It's this kind of deep analysis that sets off a meaningful dialog between two people with differing opinions allowing both people to grow and learn.
Anonymous, I would love the debate the difference between "jerked-off cum" and "the real deal." I would argue they are in fact "the same" although frequently differing in quantity and velocity.
Although this is distraction from my original point, which is, while I do not LOVE the Clientele, I think you could find a much more erudite, precise, or even let's-say-intelligible way to critique them.
When two people fuck, and one of those people is about to come, the other person is a factor in every movement, every nervous impulse that leads up to the final product. But, maybe I'm splitting hairs here: it's probably just as nice when someone jerks off in your face.
The clientele aren't musicians any more than Pavlov was.
Is the connection here: When a bell rings Pavlov's dog salivates and when someone jerks off in your face *you* salivate?
man, you know, sometimes a girl wants to take a break from quirk-hating vitriol and write about something she really quite likes. and what happens? anonymous vitriol. the extent of the vitriol i don't really understand, but the anonymity i find appalling. if you're going to comment lamely, at least give us a name that we can transform into a mean-spirited in-joke.
Elective anonymity is one of the last true virtues of the internet, when you can get it.
Anonymous, what music do you like? What is the real deal?
well i was only going to comment on yer blog when i was sober but then i would never get to say anything so... this is great i think the clientele should use this as a blurb. it's brilliant.
"clientele is cuntmusic for people who are already so dead they can't tell the difference between jerked-off cum and the real deal. and when i say they're dead, i mean they're little scumbubbles floating on the surface of the broth of life. People who are so divorced from things of any real meaning, that they easily slip into that drunken state of appeasement with their own microuniverse, totally afraid, and secretly gleeful that they'll never, ever be forced to consider anything other than what's right in front of them."
there's always gonna be scumbubbles on a soapbox...
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