Clean
(Merge)
The Clean's music sneaks up on you, coalescing out of lo-fi hazes and indeterminant grooves, its melodies nonchalant to the point of slackness, its slanting, Eastern-toned guitars glinting in the corners of fog-bound jams. It's a band that hardly seems to be trying at all, let alone trying for pop, so when it occurs to you, several listens in, that "In the Dreamlife You Need a Rubber Soul" is a nearly perfect Beatles-esque pop song, it's a surprise. A very pleasant surprise. Still it shouldn't be, because The Clean has been turning out slow-revealing, iridescent grooves for three decades now, and Mister Pop is only the latest of these gradually blossoming triumphs.
Mister Pop is the first new studio album in eight years for The Clean, bringing together the band's core line-up - David and Hamish Kilgour and Robert Scott - in a sound that is noticeably more pop than 2001's Getaway. The album starts, incongruously, with "Loog"'s Stereolab-ish drone, all shivery keyboards and wordless female vocals, a track whose airy sweetness is only slightly fuzzed with distortion. Yo La Tengo has never denied the Clean's influence on them. Here is the Clean taking cues right back from them. The second track "Are You Really On Drugs" is janglier, more percussive, the vocals echoing in empty rooms over an insistent beat, the bridge shot through with the distinctive sound of David Kilgour finding a note on his guitar and letting it hang in the ether. But it is not until "Dreamlife" that the band really hits its stride, Hamish Kilgour slapping out a raucous beat, David bending notes in serpentine whorls and mandalas, airy harmonies following his melodic lines in clouds and wafts of dreaminess. "Back in the Day" slouches charmingly, a loose-jointed groove knit to spoke-sung observations, (among them, "I'm not here for a long time/I'm just here for a good time"). It's the sort of song that seems to barely hang together, that might be winking at you or just perhaps closing its eyes, and yet it does come together with an indefiniteness that evokes rather than blurs.
David Kilgour is, naturally, the album's dominant voice, but others in the band get their turn as well. Bassist Robert Scott wrote two songs for the album, the wonderfully 1960s mystic "Asleep in the Tunnel" and even slower, even trippier "All Those Notes." This later tune closes out the album in an almost religious haze, his reverbed vocals disappearing into the stratosphere as Scott's clanking, pick-dragging bass roughens the sound. And in the instrumental "Moonjumper," Hamish Kilgour's drumming is the engine that propels forward motion, always insistent, occasionally explosive, both keeping the piece together and blowing it, periodically, apart. The cut, with its droning textures of string and organ, might easily dissolve into mush without him, and with him, it never loses its tension.
This is easily one of the year's best albums, both a dream-fuzzed journey through non-linear states of consciousness and a well-crafted pop album. Play it a few times first losing yourself in its cloudy textures, then to finding guide ropes of melody that will lead you through to the end. It's well worth the effort.
Standout Tracks: "In the Dreamlife You Need a Rubber Soul", "Factory Man" "Asleep in the Tunnel" JENNIFER KELLY
