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Live Review
by SashaS
19-6-2004
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| Clinet: sultry electro-pop frau-line |
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Live: Client
Metro, London
Thursday, June 17, 2004
Client: two birds on a mission wire
Throwback is the undisputed characteristic of today’s artistry. There’s too much past dwelling and this coinage simply points out at blasting it back into our sensory range of longing for some ‘better times’. Anyone who’s been there will tell you that it ain’t so, definitely. It is just recycling of ideas, tunes, visions, fashion… Ignorance is cultivated, information is replaced with advertising, the truth is spun too many times it suffers with psycho-disorder… Quality, whatever little there’s left, has been replaced with disposable, interchangeable and more eye- than ear-candy…
It generally feels like a blank century… To succeed nowadays you need three things: looks, luck and lucre. The first is obvious, the second is to be at the right place at the right time playing the right tunes and finally, money to convince everyone of ‘star’ quality. That huge hype machine needs a lot of pumping in… ‘Tabloid-pop’ that can’t last until the next edition!
Music, that is of lesser significance and it is usually the covers. Originality, alike in the movies, is replaced with remaking the tried, familiar and already proven ‘artefacts’. To the looks, add a subdivision of - love interest, viz. sex-appeal and top it with goss-inches to create a celeb-but-never-a-star and we’ve gotten something approaching a formula.
Client do comply with a lot of the above requirements but are yet to capture the mass imagination. The band’s second album, already saved on their HD, 'City' - due for release on 06 September - continues the story of the debut, ‘Client’, with subtle upgrading of their intelligent electro-pop and going “darker, bleaker and more lush”, claim the two principal members - Client A & Client B - augmented live by additional players.
These two-femmes-on-a-mission’s year-long touring has allowed them to master their nerves although Client B - aka Sarah Blackwood, formerly of Dubstar - is a great singer she appears a tad too apprehensive to let it go. Perhaps she doesn’t want to for the sake of tad of a Teutonic feel in music - but an impression is that she’s holding back a bit much.] Client A, Kate Holmes, also has a sizeable - if less pop-chart pedigree but DJ experience.
Within songs several reflections occur: past and post-modern united in celebrating the [lousy] present, tragically serene and fun-to-have tie-in, passé and futuristic, bright and glum… And you think a Talking Heads line - “How did I get here?” - to this rising yob-culture? Is the meaning of life really ‘42’? If we were to be removed from the stellar charts to make room for a galactic hyper-speedway, would the current culture be a honourable ending? Client’s material comes near to it…
Tracks - old and new, ‘Rock and Roll Machine’ [it should have been a hit, also featured in ‘Football Factory’, directed by Nick Love], the new single ‘In It For the Money’, ‘Price of Love’, ‘Happy’ sound as pop should: catchy, quirky, sassy and sexy…
We plunder the past too much for the future’s sake… Thus, thank God for acts who genuinely and earnestly believe in artistic expression, in reaching beyond the boundaries set by the previous generations, attempting to expend. Music-loving artists appear to be getting fewer by day and not many have surfaced in Britain since… whenever the pop-clonerium got launched. [The worrying penchant is to look away from the exciting, inviting, engaging and gorgeous Goldfrapp and get hooked on the recycle-by-number hits by Usher, Aemon, [almost all] rappers…
No shock the music industry is dying: senses are corrupted with uninspired views blanketing everyone, from pre-teens via kid-ults to senior-pop with a campaign that cossets with inoffensive, warm and dumb soundtrack to living by proxy. [A soap-opera is not a substitute for life…] This inner-child screams for more Clients but the subliminal art lover envisages large army of androids invading through the ether. Alienation by pop industry creates the fallen kids of The Nephilim.
It is such a joy to be clientele of women in uniform…
SashaS
14-7-2003
Client's second album 'City' is due for release on 06 Sept. 2004 by Toast Hawaii/Mute
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