Pitchfork

When I was in high school a friend drove a 1970 Impala that his gearhead dad had kept garaged for years. The radio was AM-only, and as luck would have it, reception was poor and the only station it could pull was Lansing, Mich.'s version of the "Golden Oldies" format. Oldies, yes, these were the songs to hear in this car. Tooling through the streets while listening to pop singles from the late 1950s and early '60s through that factory-original system, the production of the era made perfect sense. Songs like the Flamingos' "I Only Have Eyes for You" or the Association's "The Time it Is Today", with all their lush reverb, opened up the single in-dash speaker and kept us in the middle of the music as if it was Dolby 5.1. Those producers knew exactly what they were doing.

Reverb gives the illusion of immersion, and immersion is what the Clientele is all about. Singer and guitarist Alasdair Maclean writes songs that work like songs are supposed to, but I've no desire to hear them covered by another artist. Clientele songs are bound tightly to the performance and production; to separate them would destroy the effect. Still, the band's signature sonic trick-- laying a thick coating of reverb Maclean's voice in tribute to the AM radio production of the '60s-- has in a sense been isolating; such a relentless stylization is bound to turn away some people.

There's a subtle shift in that regard here on Strange Geometry, the Clientele's second full-length. The reverb is toned down considerably, strings have been added (courtesy of Louis Philippe), and the album as a whole is more direct and focused. This clarity foregrounds Maclean's songwriting talent, a poetic ear tuned into a more surreal world, with darker images bumping against the bucolic scenes of records past. The music retains its easy tunefulness, but inside many of the songs lurks a desperation that seems new to the Clientele world. "Crowds pulled you away, through the ribbons and the rain, and the ivy coiled around my hands" in "(I Can't Seem To) Make You Mine". And then on the catchy mid-tempo "E.M.P.T.Y.", Maclean sings, "Driving west, now half past five/ My skin is cut, my hands are knives."

On previous Clientele records loneliness and romantic longing led to a hyper-aware state of quiet contemplation; here there's a vague suggestion of underlying violence. "The crowd" is mentioned throughout Strange Geometry but the narrator never seems part of it. Instead he wanders the streets seeing things--lifeless bodies in doorways, his own face inside trees-- that may or may not be there. Passages of blissed-out musical haiku like Suburban Light's "6 am Morningside" or The Violet Hour's "Haunted Melody" are nowhere to be found.

It's not right to play up the differences too much, though; this is in most respects a classically "Clientele" record. The primary differences can be found by comparing the version of "Impossible" from last year's Ariadne EP with the one released here. On the former, Maclean's voice sounds like it's been bounced off the ionosphere an ocean away, and the band's instruments sound pinched and aged. The Strange Geometry version begins with a stately string arrangement as a lead-in to a much meatier sound, while sticking with the same basic arrangement. The slight nods to accessibility and the decreased stylization might disappoint some of the faithful at first, but Strange Geometry grows more appealing with repeated listening. On the whole, Strange Geometry does a better job than The Violet Hour translating the Clientele's aesthetic, which lends itself easily to the single or EP, to the demands of a full-length record. One of today's most consistently wonderful bands has kept up its long winning streak.