I Am Not There Anymore, regularly evokes what MacLean calls “the feeling of not being real.” Many of the songs were inspired by MacLean’s memories of the early summer in 1997, when his mother died, but also represent The Clientele pushing towards a new sonic frontier as a band, experimenting over the course of a three-year recording period.
Of this stretching out, MacLean says, “We’d always been interested in music other than guitar music, like for donkey’s years.” This time out, he and bassist James Hornsey and drummer Mark Keen incorporated elements of post-bop jazz, contemporary classical, and electronic music. According to MacLean, “None of those things had found their way into our sound other than in the most passing way, in the faintest imprint.”
With those elements in the foreground, I Am Not There Anymore reasserts The Clientele’s standing among the great stylists of pop music, deftly shifting from image to image, mood to mood, in a way that feels both new and classically them.
Released: July 2023
Cat: MRG807
Label: Merge Records
Listen
Tracklist
Side A
1. Fables of the Silverlink
2. Radial B
3. Garden Eye Mantra
4. Segue 4 (iv)
5. Lady Grey
Side B
6. Dying in May
7. Conjuring Summer In
8. Radial C (Nocturne for Three Trees)
9. Blue Over Blue
10. Radial E
Side C
11. Claire's Not Real
12. My Childhood
13. Chalk Flowers
14. Radial H
15. Hey Siobhan
Side D
16. Stems of Anise
17. Through the Roses
18. I Dreamed of You, Maria
19. The Village Is Always on Fire