LP - The Clientele - The Violet Hour

1LP

The Clientele's debut album. "The Violet Hour", on Merge vinyl for the very first time. Long out of print and highly sought after since its initial 2003 UK issue on Pointy, this pressing marks the first time "The Violet Hour" has been widely available on the format in North America.

Following the breakthrough success of "Suburban Light", the 2001 collection of The Clientele's initial singles and EPs, the band was set loose inside a studio to record a full-length album. What they emerged with from London's Medina Road Studios in the fall of 2002 was tantalizing: Their already sharply realized motif of 1960s psychedelia and modern fuzz-pop took on inflections of jazz, particularly in how the space afforded by the LP format allowed for a keener articulation of atmosphere.

The Clientele stretch the early evening of "The Violet Hour" out infinitely, manipulating the structured time of the pop song the way poets manipulate the structure of language - to capture place, mood, stray thoughts, disappointments, potential, and, above all, longing.

It is a shimmering jewel of a record, its languid melodies and reverb-drenched choruses at once sublime and tragic, its hazy, dreamlike discursions at once recalling the warmth of a favourite record played over a midsummer rainstorm while yearning for the mist-veiled future of a yet unwritten night.