Bonfires on the Heath

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Review by Barry Walters

Get past this London four-piece's overt Englishness, and you're left with shadows, echoes, inferences. Like many indie bands, the Clientele has always held in high regard nostalgia for things only experienced through the dusty prism of faded films, moldy books and scratched LPs. At first, its fourth proper album seems as though it might not be all that different from its predecessors: Misleadingly perky opening track "I Wonder Where We Are" opens with a guitar riff that paraphrases a dozen Smiths singles, followed by some Love-ly Spanish trumpets that reappear throughout, playing jaunty counterpoint to the downbeat moods that dominate.

But with the subsequent title track and many that follow, a sense of identity sets in that's greater than the sum of the Clientele's influences. Shorn of the Louis Philippe string arrangements of the last two discs and most additional players, Bonfires is a considerably leaner disc in which having less means more. Keyboardist/violinist Mel Draisey comes into her own here: the melodies she plays are among the record's most memorable, and the shared intimacy between the players is palpable: The studio detailing is still there, but more importantly a sense of four people simultaneously interacting defines the music's sensual flow. While no one was looking, the Clientele got sexy.

Frontman Alasdair MacLean has also learned to maximize his lyrical impact by minimizing his verbiage and making each word matter. The most memorable sections of the title track are the ones that fall between his whispery vocals: Never have the band's chord progressions or instrumental harmonies been this lovely. A shortage of ideas is often suggested when a singer repeats a song's title throughout its chorus, but MacLean follows three utterances of the words "I know I will see your face" on the track of the same name with the phrase "when I close my eyes," and the result is arguably his most evocative song, one that'll haunt your head long after this autumnal album is over. That line's so good that it might be stolen, but everything that musically and emotionally underscores this likely lift argues that he wrote it anew. That's an intangible but incredible difference.