Listening to The Clientele can feel like thumbing through a stack of old Polaroids. With everything now rendered in glistening photo-realistic high definition, Polaroids seem to depict experiences more the way memories work: hazy, underexposed and imperfect. The Clientele's latest album, Bonfires on the Heath, aches with the same washed-out nostalgia.
A band out of time, The Clientele conjures the ghosts of chirpy British pop and the mellow, sepia-toned rock of the mid-1960s. Yet, while there are clearly trace elements of Donovan and The Zombies, the band's debt to the past is more about feeling and mood than note-for-note re-creations.
"Harvest Time" finds singer Alasdair MacLean embracing a looser, psychedelic space than The Clientele has occupied in recent years. MacLean recently said in an interview that the song was inspired by "an accidental ingestion of LSD," which perhaps explains the expansive colors it inhabits. Opening with a positively transcendental sitar drone, pulsating guitar melodies and drawn-out vocal harmonies, "Harvest Time" serves as a comfortably lived-in ode to autumnal introspection. The song's overall effect feels like a reflection on memories that seem to look better the more they fade.
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