The Clientele @ World's Best Rock Venue

I saw the Clientele last night at Johnny Brenda’s. It was my first time at the club, and the great things I’ve been hearing were all true, and in full effect. They serve excellent food and beers; their owners are also proprietors of the Standard Tap, a Northern Liberties staple. The small size is ideal, and the stage is high—more to the point, they have a balcony that looks almost directly down on the performers, and this is a great angle to watch the musicians—you can really see the way all of them are playing, working with their instruments.

I was particularly happy with this because I wanted to watch Alisdair MacLean play guitar. He’s one of the rare figures of the past 20 years of rock who has managed to do something original with the electric guitar. In fact, he’s managed to do something with that very staple of college rock guitar, the “jangle.” In his playing, jangling is full of detail, and drawn out into blurry, dreamlike clouds of sound. He plays a lot of major 7 chords, but they never sound loungey. The main thing I was able to glean with my less than acute eyes was that he finger picks everything. I could see a pick sitting on top of his Fender Deluxe Twin Reverb. But he never touched it, that I noticed. This is extremely rare in rock and roll. And while he’s playing using a folky method, the music is still always clearly sounding pop. A few years ago a friend told me that when they play live they sound just like on their recordings—his point was, essentially, so why go see them. But it was actually impressive to see how effectively they created the sound with just four musicians; and Maclean's voice was pitch-perfect, with the exact same hushing reverb treatment that the band is probably best known for. Another aspect of the JB’s experience: the sound is excellent. Rock clubs have come such a long way since when I started going to shows over 20 years ago. That’s a form of gentrification I’ll take—a lot of the grit of the old days was simply pretention, anyways.