when everybody's lost without a trace

It feels a little inevitable that I would be sitting here at the end of the year/decade listening to and writing about The Clientele. There is always this sense of world weariness and ache of nostalgia attached to Alasdair MacLean’s songs that seems made for reflective moods, and their most recent Bonfires on the Heath is no different. (I have read somewhere that this album might be the band’s last collective effort, and I can only hope this can be interpreted as an “unsubstantiated rumor”.) A warm brew of sadness settles all over several of the album’s most beautifully crafted numbers “Jennifer and Julia” and “Never Saw Them Before”. The band prove to be adept as ever in filling out the porcelain sound, providing exquisite musical accompaniment to MacLean’s languid dreams: the plaintive steel guitar employed to mournful effect on the title track; the ghosts of childhood linger on “Graven Wood” with its softly spiraling violins and guitar atmospherics hypnotizing the listener into The Clientele’s world of buried disappointments through the verges of suburban light.