After a period when
the Clientele
seemed to be gracing the indie pop world with another album's worth of melancholy melodies every year or two, they began to take their time as they matured and started living real lives while also undertaking other projects. 2017's
Music for the Age of Miracles
arrived after eight years of relative silence; after another painfully long gap,
I Am Not There Anymore
was released in 2023. The band used the time between albums to bounce ideas back and forth online and to experiment with computers and arrangements before heading back to the studio to flesh out another album's worth of gloriously autumnal pop music. In the early stages of working on the album, they began to explore different styles of music such as electric jazz a la
Miles Davis
and various forms of electronic music. They manage to fold both into their already-established approach with sure-handed finesse, adding programmed drums, tricky editing, stately jazz tempos, and a general sense of exploratory freedom that hadn't always been part of their music. These elements do nothing to detract from another stunning set of songs that move from tender ballads with cascading choruses ("Blue on Blue"), jangling tunes like "Lady Grey" tailor-made for walks on leaf-strewn garden paths, and a series of impressionistic instrumental interludes to progressive pop, like the almost-eight-minute-long "Fables of the Silverlink," which folds in breakbeats, string quartet interludes, triumphant horns, and a bracingly plangent vocal by
Alasdair MacLean
. The album is equal parts
Clientele
at their best and at their most experimental, battling to a draw that leaves the listener the ultimate winner. It's exceedingly rare for a band this far into their career to be willing to make major tweaks to their established sound, and this trio seems to have no fear of doing so. The rambling, hypnotic "Dying in May" is like nothing they've made before, the chanted vocals, swaths of sampled, warped strings, twinkling percussion, and spiraling drumming are psychedelic and free, yet still pointedly emotional. Other songs do just as good a job balancing deep feelings and diverse sounds; the whole album is brought to tear-filled life by
MacLean
's lyrics. Most songs revolve around his mother's death and the lingering pangs of sadness that can be brought back to shuddering life in ways both trivial and massive. He does a wonderful job of transmitting his feelings of loss without giving details, just letting the feelings ebb and flow across the album like they do across the years. It adds up to another pitch-perfect album from the band, certainly one of their best and most devastatingly pretty works. In a career full of brilliance, that's saying a lot. ~ Tim Sendra