Brighton indie stalwarts CLEARLAKE have been away for a while and while it's stretching it to say their return is eagerly awaited in all quarters, they have re-emerged with a renewed resolve and strength of purpose with "Amber" that should entice people to take notice who might previously have dismissed them out of hand.
Advance reports reaching your reviewer have veered towards ver 'Lake employing a more muscular sound than the sometimes slightly weedy indie-lite of yore, and for once the rumour mill seems to have checked its' sources, for the majority of "Amber" does indeed find Jason Pegg and co in brash, steroid-ed up form, not least on tracks like recent single "Good Clean Fun" (all martial drums, Buzzcocks-mutate-with-Velvets guitars and curiously listless vocals), the Jim Abiss-produced "Neon" with its' wailing blues harp, cranked up Bo Diddley/ Birthday Party rhythms and dislocated lyrics culminating in Pegg spitting "Christ knows whee we are, 'cos the high streets look the same/ guess that's the cost of living kicking in again." All of a sudden, the fresh-faced bunch of young tearaways who once imagined dear old Brighton as the mythical town of Clearlake seem to have grown up and taken a good few of real life's knocks.
Indeed, a distinct undercurrent of dissatisfaction seems to shadow Pegg and his comrades througout "Amber", but it only succeeds in lifting them to a higher artistic plain. Opener "No Kind Of Life" , for example, starts with a lyric ("You rely on someone else to make you feel alive/ as far as I can see, it's no kind of life" ) that sounds like something out of a self-assertion class, but it's married with a taut, pensive, drum-heavy tune that sounds like the sort of thing Graham Coxon does so well these days. Elsewhere, "I Hate It That I Got What I Wanted" may sound like an analytically bleak end result, but goes from niggly to anthemic with great gusto and "Finally Free" finds Pegg noting sarcastically "I'll say what I want 'cos nobody's listening", but the track's wonked-out Strokes-style riffing is massively infectious.
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But even allowing for the bigger rock dynamic that often holds sway (hell, it's even acknowledged with a tune called "Widescreen" that's every bit as cinematically dramatic as its' title suggests), Clearlake still shoehorn some welcome introspective weirdness into the plot. Indeed, tracks like the dreamy "You Can't Have Me" - with its' gorgeous reverbed guitar and patient cresecendos - the vividly melancholy "Dreamt That You'd Died" and the strange, but alluring glockenspiels and looped FX of the title track all act like welcome oases of calm amid the upfront guitar assault.
Hearteningly, they keep one of their best songs yet in reserve for last in "It's Getting Light Outside". Driven by nagging, off-kilter guitars, tambourines and Spectorian timpani, it finds Pegg sounding considerably more blissful and content than for the rest of the album and concluding "I feel fine in your company, even when we sit silently" before the song finally succumbs to the gently skirling strings.
Taken individually, "Amber" sounds like a confident musical stride forward, even if their leader tempers it with some uncharacteristically pessimistic lyrical invective. But then you never know with Clearlake, which is of course part of their allure in the first place.
So, like their similarly offbeat neighbours British Sea Power, Clearlake appear to have undergone a steely, but effective makeover. Surprisingly, it suits them to a T, and overall I hear no reason not to give "Amber" the green light.
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