The May installment of our ongoing 25th Anniversary reissue series is The Clientele’s Suburban Light. 

Released as a double-disc and one-LP/one-CD set, this new edition of Suburban Light features the album in its original European track listing, restored from original analog tapes to sound warmer and a bit less like a batch of demos. The bonus material includes a revelatory set of covers, rehearsals, B-sides, and three unreleased tunes.

Suburban Light was meant to be a complicated, high-production affair rendered in a major studio. From 1997 until 2000, The Clientele had released a  string of 7” singles on several labels—Pointy and Fierce Panda, Elefant and Johnny Kane. These songs were demos, preparations for the album they knew they’d doubtlessly make. When it finally came time to record that debut, the four post-graduate friends entered expensive studios during off hours. Instead of finding their sound, though, they only found frustration.

“We were just waiting to get in a proper studio and have strings, brass, choirs—Phil Spector-crossed-with-Martin Hannett production,” MacLean remembers. “At the time, every engineer wanted to make every band sound like Radiohead, which just broke everyone’s heart. We couldn’t get a warm sound anywhere we went in those days.”

They went, then, with the demos, relatively primitive but especially intimate recordings they made wherever they lived and whenever they wanted. Perhaps that was all for the best: Though The Clientele would later add more flourishes and finesse to their records,Suburban Light establishes the unwavering, minimal core of the band. MacLean’s marriage of grace and tension on the guitar ripples throughout “Lacewings,” a brilliant reverie of chemicals and romance and young-adult lassitude. Drummer Howard Monk and bassist James Hornsey conduct a minor miracle of text painting during “Joseph Cornell,” capturing MacLean’s lyrics about evaporating happiness with a rhythm section that sits somewhere between rock bustle and blues languidness. Suburban Light is very much the sound of four pals, playing songs written from a place with which they all identify. They were living these scenarios.

The Clientele will perform at Chickfactor 22 on March 21 at the Bell House in Brooklyn, NY.

The Clientele were:

Daniel Evans – drums
Alasdair MacLean – guitar, keyboards and vocals
Innes Phillips – guitar, vocals
Howard Monk – drums

The Clientele – Suburban Light reissue
1. I Had to Say This
2. Rain
3. Reflections After Jane
4. We Could Walk Together
5. Monday’s Rain
6. Joseph Cornell
7. An Hour Before the Light
8. (I Want You) More Than Ever
9. Saturday
10. Five Day Morning
11. Bicycles
12. As Night is Falling
13. Lacewings

Bonus Material:
1. Sarah’s Prelude (Previously unreleased)
2. 6am Morningside (7″ previously released in Spain by Elefant Records, February 2000)
3. What Goes Up (7″ previously released in UK by Pointy Records, June 1998)
4. From a Window (Previously released by Merge Records on the US version of Suburban Light, 2001)
5. Driving South (Previously released in US by Merge Records on Fading Summer EP, 2001)
6. Porcelain (Portastudio version) (7″ previously released in US by Slumberland Records, 2001)
7. May Has Brought A Change in You (Previously unreleased)
8. Monday’s Rain (Portastudio version) (Previously unreleased)
9. Tracey Had a Hard Day Sunday (Previously released in UK by Earworm Records on “‘Outta’ Town Outer Space / A West Coast Pop Art Experimental Band Covers E.P.”, 2001)
10. Six Foot Drop (7″ Previously released in US by Drive in Records, 2001)

http://www.mergerecords.com/suburban-light-reissue