The Clientele, Strange Geometry

You'd be forgiven for not identifying the Clientele as a pop band. Up until this point, the UK trio seemed a little ashamed of that fact themselves. For the last eight years they've played a perverse game of duck-and-cover, smothering their crystalline choruses under layers of dense haze that blurred the edges and made the melodies feel muted and indirect. There's a honey of a heartbreaker buried somewhere in the band's 2000 single "(I Want You) More Than Ever," but the band hid it so far under a bushel of reverb that it would take a medium with a divining rod to find it.

The Clientele blow that fog away on Strange Geometry, their cleanest, clearest and most immediately winning effort to date. It's fine and good to emulate Felt's cumulonimbus pop, but eventually even Felt caved in and made the crisp and coherent Forever Breathes the Lonely Word. The Clientele seem perfectly at ease following suit. The music is still spare — the group's echoey guitar patterns are fleshed out only by flourishes of violin — but there's a beauty here that has eluded them in the past. "My Own Face Inside the Trees" is brisk and jaunty, like the best moments of Donovan or Peter & Gordon. By contrast, "When I Came Home From the Party" is a brooder done in waltz-time and the chorus to "(I Can't Seem To) Make You Mine" is all raw ache and sorrow.

Which brings us to the next point — that the Clientele have saved their most sublime music for their most heartbreaking work; the titular geometry refers to a relationship that's gone pear-shaped, and over the course of the album's dozen songs, vocalist Alasdair McLean combs over the past to try to pinpoint all the wrong turns and blown chances. A character named K. (just a hunch, but it's probably not the same one from The Trial) is the object of McLean's thwarted affections, and she materializes spirit-like again and again to taunt and torment him over his mistakes. McLean has a knack for making tiny details seem towering and significant — rusty nails, pine trees and cars on a highway all become emblems of loneliness, objects that remain separate even when surrounded. And while it may be overstating the point to title a song "E.M.P.T.Y.," the group at least has the good sense to fill it up with spinning Free Design strings and a melody that tumbles deliriously up the staff. Strange Geometry is a record of clarity — both sonic and otherwise — and of the truths that transparency reveals.