There's not a really good reason to pair The Clientele's I Am Not There Anymore and the Berlin Clock, other than I love them both.
I'd been a fan of The Clientele several years ago, when God Save the Clientele was released. It's one of the first albums I shared with my mother, thinking that she's like that it was vaguely '60s, dreamy at times and definitely British. A longtime fan of music from England in the '60s, she enjoyed it and quoted "Isn't Life Strange" to me a couple of times.
In any case, I lost touch with The Clientele for a few years, partly because their newer albums didn't connect with me as much as God Save the Clientele and because they'd released albums less frequently.
That changed with I Am Not There Anymore, which grabbed me from the first listen. It's different, energetic and more playful. Maybe not coincidentally, they seem to be playing with new ideas. Although it's not electronic, it has traces of more nimble editing in it. As Marc Hogan wrote in Pitchfork: 'If the key difference for I Am Not There Anymore, as [their chief songwriter] has observed, is the Clientele’s purchase of a computer, then, with all due respect: What took ’em so long?'
The first song, "Fables of the Silverlink", and "Blue over Blue" are the ones that have stuck with me the most. The first is audacious and, for a seven-plus minute song, incredibly nimble. "Blue over Blue" is beautiful and delightfully breaks down at 2.30 and reanimates itself differently.
The album also concerns time in a number of ways, which is the only way I can justify drawing the Mengenlehreuhr on the card. I came across the clock when visiting Berlin a few years ago. Its origin and the method of reading it are explained well on Wikipedia and an online version of the clock is available.
Photo source: secretcitytravel
