So I listened to the Clientele's new album, 'Bonfires on the Heath', and there's one thing that really annoys me about it. It's not the lap steel glissandi and the Pink Floyd chord progressions, which, in the song Bonfires on the Heath, are a reverse of the hallmark Breathe In The Air / Any Colour You Like Im7-IV7 (the band quickly rectify this error in the next song, Harvest Time, by playing the sequence in order for the whole song). I also quite like the treble-heavy, half-whispered, half-strained vocals.
No, in terms of timbre, I think the Clientele have something not too bad (although a few more songs not drenched in MacLean's clean reverb guitar parts would have been good). The problem I have with this album is the reliance on one particular syncopated rhythm, again in the guitar part, in about half the songs on the album:
I think bands can almost get away with playing the same chord progression for half an album (as there are so many ways of articulating harmony), most albums have the same texture throughout, and many songs will use the same instruments, keeping the timbres in a straight-jacket, not to mention the fact that they will be structurally identical. But if there's one element in pop that is guaranteed to give you that 'same-y' sound that grates on the listener, it is rhythmic invariability across half an album. Rhythm and tempo dictate 'feel', 'vibe', 'swing', 'swagger', and whilst dance genres exploit the furthest possibilities of such ideas, pop cannot successfully do so without sounding, well, same-y.
Otherwise I had quite a good time listening to this album.
