Article Response: Album Of The Year

It means much. It moves me where it matters. I have to hear this record.

In 95-97 I did have terrible pop-ideological doubts about liking anything that didn't seem "modern", though it was as much political as musical. Put it this way, I couldn't have liked XTC's "Apple Venus Volume One" had it come out in the late Major era. I bet nobody is interested or surprised to know that.

All is much better now. I have to hear this record.

My fookin' Aunty Noreen. 'Singing through gauze'? You know what, gauze is spelt wrong, I think the spelling you were looking for is "through a big stinky bumhole". Overrated overhyped bunged up public schoolboy ear cringing in the worst limp and pandering way. Sure go ahead and listen to the Clientele but don't expect me to have any respect for you. You know what all the stuff about the Clientele that I have read sounds like? It sounds like writing about the Smiths. And I think THAT STINKS TOO. Sainted tracks? Get thee to a nunnery! But bear in mind they don't allow wanking as such I have seen over the Clientele in *there*. WANK!

Nothing personal.

Phew, rock n roll eh? It's worth mentioning that I am a public schoolboy and in this weather pretty bunged up to. It's a beautiful album and you're silly not to like it, ha.

Sarah, you're not actually trying to be the Arthur Scargill of ILM, are you :).

Bringing class-consciousness into pop. The lowest form of abuse known to man.

Oh dig yourself out of your hole and deny that the singer sounds like the STEREOTYPE of a public schoolboys voice! It does! And trust me if class consciousness was an issue I was arsed about at all with the Clientele you would have known it! The only class that I can group the Clientele in is the class that is known as "pants on toast" which sadly affects most social stratifications! I could just say "like a big smelly ponce" if you'd prefer that? Or I could just call my mates at the Socialist Worker to duff fans of the Clientele up for associating me with someone from YORKSHIRE. Boo.

I don't deny that The Clientele's singer sounds like the public schoolboy stereotype (unlike Tom, who talks like Danny Kelly). But my point is that, in pop, ***that doesn't matter***.

And Jon Anderson doesn't sound like a public schoolboy, Starry? Albeit one with relatively clear sinuses.

Yeah, but do the Clientele wear capes?

No!

They cannot pull it off.

So they wank musically instead!

Hahahahahhaha I am funny!

For what it's worth: I have finally heard the LP. I like it. But I thought that the article was miles over the top, or perhaps just wide of the mark. The article felt naive - which is not what I expect from Tom E, who is a fine writer and knows much more about pop music, and indeed many other things, than I do.

I don't think it's a surprise that the article is 'naive', as the pinefox puts it, because the Clientele seems to encourage that in one - at least, initially. The funny thing is that it seems possible to reconcile Sarah's characterization of Alasdair as the stereotypical public school boy with the beauty of their music. At first, it may seem that the only way to capture that beauty is to write like they make music. Somewhere Alasdair showed his disdain for Belle and Sebastian by remarking that his sister's reaction to the band, with which he implicitly agreed, is that they just didn't try hard enough. I can see why they would think that about Belle and Sebastian, although I don't think that making the kind of effort that Alasdair makes is the way Stuart has gone about making music or the way that he should.

When you first hear the Clientele, it's so dazzling, it's hard not to think of the beauty as all there is and not to get carried away by it. It is the kind of beauty that takes your breath away, i.e. the melting, sliding sounds on "lacewings". I thought that the article made some good points, i.e. associating their music with youth. But their music seems to be motivated by a love of beauty, not just desire. For instance, some of the songs are quite cinematic (We Could Walk Together, Joseph Cornell), and Alasdair seems to have that kind of vision (http://www.twisterella.com/t2/ne/twisterella/clientelefilm.html). It's also supposed to be the direction they'll take with their forthcoming ep.

I can only listen to the Clientele when I'm really happy. There seem to be lots of ways of being to which their music is not sympathetic. Their music seems to demand a lot from the listener, not meaning that it's complex so that you have to concentrate when you listen, but in the way that you have to work to be happy. The idealism of youth. Sometimes I wonder if I'm just being dazzled by effects: when I only had the ep and listened to it repeatedly so that the music began to separate, I could see that it would not stand up to being listened to in that way. And sometimes I wonder if the beauty of their music is contrived or brittle since it's so easy to be out of sympathy with it, which I think was Tom's initial reaction to the band from an entry some time ago in NYLPM.

I think it's considered bad or reactionary to take into account things about the artist, but the image of a snot-nosed public schoolboy as singer puts an interesting spin on their music. So what if beauty has such sources? And, yeah, it does seem to be something of which only youth would be capable. (I wouldn't say it's a deception.) But I've wondered if Alasdair is naive; the extravagant praise of the band from the music press quoted on their web site makes me think that he isn't. Or maybe that's a reason to think that he is?

The Clientele may perhaps encourage 'naivety'; maybe lots of great pop does. But I didn't feel that Tom E, in his review, was writing a 'performative' response that 'embodied' what the band were about; I felt that he was trying to articulate, roughly speaking, 'the truth about the band'. In other words, I thought that he was trying to be as non-naive - I mean, as canny, intelligent and clued-up - as he almost always seems to be in his writing. And I think that - for once - he failed.

Alasdair C has never told me that he's a public schoolboy. And there was me thinking that I had never met a public schoolboy; and maybe I have. But is it true, or is it all just a virtuous rumour?

This may or may not be the place to step back from all this negativity and say something nice about the music itself. I find it spectacular when he clangs into the recurring guitar break on 'We Could Walk Together': I am struck by the autonomy of that compelling section, which reminds me of the fractured structures that Johnny Marr used to produce.

Looking back now I don't think it's one of my better pieces - in fact I don't even want to re-read it. I think there is a bit of truth in what Youn is saying, though: I was consciously trying to be a bit more 'gushing' than my writing would normally be. Somebody - Keith, I think - had contrasted FT with Tangents on the forum and I thought I would try and write a piece in what I thought might be a more Tangents-y style.

Which I failed at. Partly because it drops into my normal style midway for the bits on retro and being young and partly because I'm obviously not cut out for the kind of thing Tangents does. (And that is far from all it does, too, don't get me wrong).

I don't think Tom's article is that bad, perhaps it's almost impossible to articulate the appeal of the band without resorting to the kind of rhetoric he employs. I haven't heard the album, btw, but I do like the singles a lot. Unfortunately the two times I've seen them live have left me less impressed. Oh, and when The Pinefox talks about Alasdair C possibly being a public schoolboy I assume he mean Alasdair Clientele rather than me. I ain't no ponce: no, wait, I am.

I didn't mean to be negative about the Clientele or the article. I always find Tom's musings on pop enjoyable to read, esp. the way he combines an analysis of the music with a personal experience of it. As for the public school boy stereotype, I have a rough idea of what it's like from films like "Another Country"; I imagine that it's the British equivalent of the stereotype of Ivy Leaguers - Scott Fitzgerald-type characters. So regardless of whether Alasdair C (OK, not you Ally96) went to a public school, I thought it was undisputed that he fit the stereotype. Of course, such a stereotype would be irrelevant in a serious appraisal of their music, but in the tongue- in-cheek way that Sarah was going about baiting them, I thought it could be a cool thing about them, too. Yeah, OK, so it may be that the stereotype just has an unnatural appeal for Americans, but the idea of someone naive or not completely formed making such accomplished music was appealing. So the train of thought I wanted to follow was artifice vs. naivete in the beauty of their music. One more thing about reviews - I don't think the praise itself is excessive, rather the language in which it is expressed. People (including the Clientele) seem to be so caught up in comparing them to other bands, rather than describing specific elements in their music and what it evokes.

A96: no, for once it wasn't you. But it usually is. It will be next time.

Youn said: "So regardless of whether Alasdair C (OK, not you Ally96) went to a public school, I thought it was undisputed that he fit the stereotype".

Sorry, no way. He doesn't fit that stereotype in my book. I think of him (apart from thinking of him as a great guitarist) in terms of another stereotype: the GEEEEZER.

So when YJN says "the idea of someone naive or not completely formed making such accomplished music was appealing", I have to focus on that word 'idea' to make it at all comprehensible. Maybe from the records you've got an idea of AC as naive and unformed. In my experience he is quite the reverse.

All of this, actually, is one reason why I didn't like Tom E's article: namely, it didn't square at all with my perception of the band. To that degree, my reaction was (is) an overreaction, based 'too much' (or just, perhaps, unavoidably) on 'extra-musical' stuff: and it might fall foul of anyone who adjudged that 'responses to music should only be about The Music, not about who made it'. (This thus just about links up with other threads, like the recent one about whether a band's class background affects your response to their music.)

I don't think that Tom E was off in his response to the band. He leaves certain questions unanswered in the 5th and 6th paragraphs, which I think could have interesting answers, but to leave them unaswered fits in with the scheme of his article. Somewhere on this forum, I think PF has defended such reluctance. The sentence right after the one PF quoted is the question that I think should be explored in relation their music. It's true that I brought in extra-musical considerations - Alasdair C's attitude towards Belle and Sebastian (his view that beauty requires effort), evidence of his aesthetic sophistication(?) from his article on cinema, the way he uses the music press (which I'm not really sure about anyway cos it would be delightful to have such a favorable reception, so it might have been a simple response) - but the music itself would have been enough to go on. The stuff about public school boys was for my amusement; the real evidence for the other side is also in their music.

I wanted to explore the themes explored in Yeats' poem "Adam's Curse" in relation to their music. How does the Clientele make music so beautiful appear natural, even naive?

The difference between desire and a love of beauty might be that the latter doesn't tolerate 'weakness'. I think that there is a link between desire and naivete on the one hand and a love of beauty and artifice on the other. When I said that the music is not sympathetic, I made it sound like a valuation (when I suggested that its beauty might be contrived or brittle*), but I really should have left it (not the part about the music being brittle but about it being unsympathetic) as a statement of fact (perhaps, to be disputed).

I think there is a larger question that isn't just about the record. The 'problem' is that the music presents a view of the world in which everything is infused with beauty. If you don't or can't share that view, then is it impossible to relate to the music? At the very end of the second part of Kieslowski's "Decalogue", this man who throughout the film has been on the brink of death confides to his doctor that at that extremity everything seemed to disintegrate - the world seemed to be ugly on purpose. So there was one scene with him barely conscious - though his wife is visiting him, he is only alive to the water dripping from the ceiling along a wall, which itself is swollen with water, to the foot of his bed. There's a similar scene with an insect crawling over a spoon and around the rim of a glass of syrup/medicine. The funny thing is that in the film these things seemed beautiful.

Now I don't know where to go with this.

What is the stereotype of a GEEEEZER? Someone who wears lozenge- patterned jumpers from 1978, alternating with maroon-colored tank tops? I might need to pigeonhole someone else.

* I think I'm just afraid of listening to it too much. But then it's stingy to dwell on such fears.

Fans of Stevie Troussé might be interested to hear that he, I and a Yank once had a 3-way consultation about how to translate 'GEEEZER' into America. ST suggested 'good ol' boy'. I don't know whether this was accurate or not, but it tickles me to this day.

i spy on mailing lists all the time and i have a tendency to take things personally. i feel the need to set the record straight, as i am the one who buys the sweaters, and i was probably the one who got any snot on any microphone, and i was the one who suggested that we all sing "fever" together.

i'm gonna slap some music critics the next time i see them for the bee-gee's teeth comment.

the honest truth is that alasdair c did not go to a public school, and actually sort of likes one belle and sebastian song: "i know where the summer goes"

I thought he didn't go to a public school. That was what I said. So I was right. Thanks for clearing it up. Not that there's anything wrong with going to a public school. Is there? I wouldn't know. Like I said, I don't think I've ever seen a public school.

>> i spy on mailing lists all the time and i have a tendency to take things personally

Oh, no! Just don't be sinister.

Well, I've never seen the lovely jumper, but when David Moore suggested that it might something that his uncle would wear, I knew it had to be good. And I don't see tank tops as a Ziggy Stardust type thing, but rather as something a young man might have worn on the French Riviera long before speedos became popular. (I don't remember if the one in question is maroon, but that detail slipped in cos I thought the color would be perfect against pale skin.) So, in truth, I'm quite envious of the access Marianna must have to out-of- the-way thrift shops and bazaars.

I'm happy with the SF Weekly's "barmy English dude" as a translation for 'GEEEZER' from British English into Americanese.

I'm not. Geeeezers are not 'barmy'; at most, they might claim to be. They drink beer, they smoke tabs, they prop up the bar. They have 'mates'. They are probably good at "pool". One or two of them might turn out to be fantastic guitar players.