Pitchfork

In A Few Late Chrysanthemums, poet laureate John Betjeman recalls an anonymous childhood while observing shuttles of children on the Sussex coast. During his vivid flashback, a pack of sun-thirsty bullies shove a schoolboy, wearing "shivering shorts," into the asphalt. Betjeman holds the antagonists in rancorous contempt, brand-name addicts who serve as irrefutable proof that the Devil walks amongst us. Domino four-piece Clearlake call the same Sussex coast home, and sound like the sort of kids in shivering shorts whose skin thickened from playground pushes. But instead of marveling under the iron ribs of St. Pancras or hunting Cornish abbeys-- as did Betjemen, who vented through art and eventually found solace in Britain's spiritual architecture-- Clearlake construct their own echoing places of worship in Cedars, with some help from the Cocteau Twins' Simon Raymonde.

With the band's arcane 2001 debut, Lido, behind him, lyricist Jason Pegg clouds his nostalgia with fear and devilry. As drums clap like pew-kneelers under buttresses of strings on "The Mind Is Evil", Pegg warns like a grimacing choirboy, "it makes me do all those unspeakable things." This veiling of coal-colored sentiment in majestic settings runs through every track. In "Keep Smiling", the lines "Just nod your head accordingly and do the opposite of anything they tell you" mirror Thom Yorke's Hail to the Thief manifesto, but Pegg's de-politicized subversion strikes harder-- as unlike Yorke's reaction against the obvious, with his willingness to point the finger inward to less-admittable wickedness. Elsewhere, processional whipcracks of percussion and paint-chipped baby grands drive him to admit "I wouldn't hurt a fly, but I'd really like to punish you" on "I'd Like to Hurt You", suggesting that any of us can snap under pressure-- whether that pressure results from government, the anxious Zeitgeist, or ex-girlfriends, Pegg doesn't say, but the universal ambiguity of his sentiments injects the music with a raw and timeless nature.

The inherently uplifting alto in Pegg's lucid, lachrymose throat reverberates touches of Tin Pan Alley, layering Clearlake's sound beyond the typical moping of today's frontmen. One can almost picture him singing these songs to a starlet as he ambles across an opera-house stage. Chopped-up streaks of a flanged keyboard even whip through "Almost the Same" like stagehands hustling backdrops in Rodgers and Hart's Autobahn: The Musical.

Throughout Cedars, Clearlake continually find beauty in melancholy and melancholy behind beauty, while raising your hairs in reverence with occasional guitar squalls. Murals of feedback, keyboards, and chanting close in around "Come into the Darkness". As Pegg inverts the Golden Rule into a mantra of selfish motivation on "Treat Yourself with Kindness", lurching chords burst up the walls like shadows springing in sudden bold bars of light through stained glass. The drama segues into the closing hymn of "Trees in the City", where hope is found in the resilient growth of greenery in a smoky metropolis.

Betjeman too bemoaned the "Motopolis" that choked the charm from Oxford and the suburban sprawl of Slough with the blackest of humor. The British love to honor through a lacerating wit. It seems almost as if modernity is tolerated only with the thought that one day humanity will lose and the English countryside will expel the scars of society. Sauron will fall. Clearlake fit into this tradition as true patriots. While Lido may have been a last bastion of Britpop, Cedars towers in the tradition of the best British art.