“Looks Like I’m Running Out” by David Kilgour & the Heavy Eights

David Kilgour returns with his band the Heavy Eights for a beautifully melancholic album “Bobbie’s A Girl” which has just been released on US label Merge Records.

“Looks Like I’m Running Out” ambles along blissfully, a bit like Syd Barrett’s “Gigolo Aunt” shuffle, but it’s a pace that out-sprints the languid drifting sleep-walking state of much of the rest of the album. I mean that in a good way too.

At times it feels like the album is a conversation between worlds, between the living and the dead. As DK explained in an interview: “The whole album is a sort of mood piece, really. Grief was behind it, as you say. I lost my mother and my friend Peter [former school friend and early Clean/ Chills/ Snapper band member Peter Gutteridge] around the same time, and for a while, I made no music at all, then I started to really just indulge myself and let the melancholia wash around me.”

The album is minimalist, in words and sounds and notes and chords, yet also one of the richest, deeply textured, atmospheric collections in the substantial David Kilgour catalogue. Acoustic and electric guitars, piano, keyboards, vibes, voices; all leavened by the air between the notes.

There’s a strange kind of magic at play here. It is partly the circumstances of the album’s origins, but also maybe also aided by the provenance of the location of its recording in the 140 year old Port Chalmers building Chick’s Hotel. Some of the songs seem improvised by the band in a telepathic dream-state. It’s so laid back at times it almost falls apart. But, like those two Syd Barrett solo albums, it somehow holds itself together, willed on by primal musical instinct shared among the players and shepherded by spirits in the aether of the eternal vibrations of the universe.

“Everyone You Meet” by The Clientele

“We try to articulate that change in the air that happens when autumn comes. But it’s not a verbal thing; you can’t really express it properly with words. You can express it with music and atmosphere.” Alasdair MacLean – The Clientele

The Clientele are one of my favourite bands. Although I learned the other day they are in fact an art project rather than a band in the traditional rock and roll sense of the word. I thought they had split up several years ago after releasing “Bonfires on the Heath” (2009).

But they’ve found their way back from making a living as normal people in the real world, parenthood, gardening in suburban London allotments, and all that stuff, to make another album. “Music for the Age of Miracles” is out on 22 September and here’s “Everyone You Meet” from it:

Like everything The Clientele have done there’s an autumnal element to this song, which augers well for the new album. Autumn features a lot in the songs and the lyrics.

The Clientele has always seemed to me to be like a musical way of representing personal experience and feelings about the natural and human environment, ghostly imagery of landscape paintings, old photographs, literature and poetry, in the form of contemporary pop songs.

Here’s what songwriter, guitarist and vocalist Alasdair MacLean had to say about The Clientele in a 2015 interview  in answer to a question about refining the sound of The Clientele over 5 albums, which some listeners may view as rehashing old songs:

“I think that I completely understand why people would say that about The Clientele, as they’re viewing us in 2015 as a Rock ‘n’ Roll band. The kind of rock band that has to focus on reinvention, this Miles Davis or Picasso styled reinvention. But in 2015, Rock ‘n’ Roll bands don’t mean anything and The Clientele isn’t one; they’re an art project. Again I know that sounds aggressively pretentious.

What it is it’s a refinement of a certain idea and it’s something that’s lasted a couple of decades and a lot of people have contributed to it. So you shouldn’t expect a Kid A from us or a Screamadelica. That’s all bullshit now anyway. I don’t think it matters now, I don’t think it has any meaning anymore. What we’re doing is just rumbling on with this art project that’s been going on since the ’90s.

Our whole aim and our whole methodology is separate from what they’re looking at, what their expectations are. We don’t have that idea of the difficult third album, that’s foreign to what we do.

When The Clientele stopped making music, around Bonfires on the Heath, it was because I felt like it had gone out of control. It had gone from being this interesting, heartbreaking art-project to starting to threaten to sound like a normal band and I really didn’t want to be a part of that, so we stopped it. That was just one of the many reasons.

For me it has to not sound like a normal band, it has to go back to the vividness and the inspiration of before. And actually what we’ve done does sound like we have that. So as long as we carry on having that, we’ll carry on and make another record. If not, we’ve made five records and five records is enough for any band really. Unless you’re Robert Wyatt.”

“Stars” by The Clean

“Sometimes I’m all on my own” sings David Kilgour in “Stars”, the first song on The Clean’s 2001 album, the punningly titled “Getaway”, soon to be re-issued on vinyl for the first time by US label Merge Records on 2 December 2012.

After that sublime 1980s run of EPs and 7″ singles The Clean released their first – and best – album in 1990. “Vehicle” was from that era when vinyl was still king, and although subsequent albums “Modern Rock” (1994) and “Unknown Country” (1996) also had a limited release in LP format these were (and still are) hard to find in NZ. “Getaway” – originally released in 2001 – was exclusively a CD release.

It took The Clean another 8 years to follow up “Getaway” with the even-better “Mister Pop” which had some of their strongest songs since “Vehicle”. Whether or not “Mister Pop” will be their final chapter is anyone’s guess. In the meantime, there’s still “Getaway” to explore all over again.

“Getaway” comes with a bonus of live recordings from two rare NZ-only releases “Slush Fund” (Arclife, 2001) and “Syd’s Pink Wiring System” (Cleano, 2003).

Part of the enduring appeal of The Clean as a live band has been their singular ability to re-interpret their back catalogue in their live shows, bringing an improv jazz mindset and approach to exploring their psychedelic garage rock, making each song performance a unique event. The full track-listing of Merge Records’ “Getaway” re-issue can be viewed here.

These are the two original CD only tour merch live albums from 2000/2001 which are included with the “Getaway” re-issue as digital and CD bonus tracks. The bonus CDs are also included with the double vinyl version.

“Dean’s Room” by Allison Crutchfield

“Dean’s Room” is the first single, 3 months ahead of the release of an album called “Tourist in this Town” by Allison Crutchfield. The more you hear it, the more you want to hear it again. Pop perfection.

A song from the excellent Allison Crutchfield mini album “Lean In To It” was featured here on PopLib two years ago. That was more sparse and mellow melodic fuzzy synth-pop by comparison to this first tune from the new album, due out 27 January 2017.

“Dean’s Room” is firing on all cylinders – pummeling drums, distorted bass, an epic cheesy synth melody, nagging guitar lines and a sublime vocal delivery. If this new tune is any indication of the album, the pace and intensity has been ratcheted up to New Wave levels and the pop-tastic melodic quotient rivals any classic Blondie tunes.