“I write when I feel overwhelmed in my life,” explains Miles Chandler, singer, songwriter, and guitarist with the Boston-based band Clifford. “I want to disobey the impulse to keep these things private.” True to this confession, which appears in the press materials for their latest album, Golden Caravan,Clifford are a quartet that produce lumbering, guitar-heavy indie rock, giving voice to the frustrations and complications of everyday life. They’re not millionaires selling out arenas; they’re in the trenches with the rest of us, which makes Chandler’s songs all the more potent and easy to love.
Chandler, along with drummer Ben Curell, guitarist Danny Edlin, and bassist Nate Scaringi, worked on Golden Caravan for hours at a time on Monday nights after their day jobs, sometimes leaving the studio in an industrial neighborhood of Boston long after midnight. Opening with gentle acoustic guitar fingerpicking, “Trackstarr” starts the proceedings as Chandler sings, “Twice as proud / You stand out in any crowd / Disappointment echoes twice as loud.” This opener is slightly misleading as it quietly kicks off the record against a light but gauzy folk backdrop.
“C Song” crashes the party with distortion and a wall of electric guitars. Borrowing a page from fellow Bostonians the Pixies, the loud/quiet/loud approach is especially mesmerizing with the addition of an elegant, melodic chorus: “Well I know it’s sick but I can’t look / I can’t look away,” Chandler sings longingly.
The downbeat, heavy guitars certainly evoke the oft-used “G” word describing a specific musical phenomenon launched in the Pacific Northwest in the 1990s. Still, grunge comparisons are not only apt, they can also serve as a jumping-off point to describe Clifford’s execution, and possibly their influence. They seem to take a great deal of influence from that era, but Golden Caravan – a follow-up to 2021’s Projections of a Body Electric – is far too layered to be any sort of cookie-cutter nostalgia trip.
First of all, the songwriting is superb. There’s also plenty of sonic imagination in the arrangements, from the Motorik drumbeats, searing guitar work and vocal harmonies in “Ink Blot” (featuring backing vocals from Mei Semones, who also shows up on the frenetic, snarling “Exaltation Forms”) to the hypnotic, anthemic centerpiece of a title track, filled with guitar assaults and Chandler’s cathartic lyrics about living in a world carelessly stuffed with hatred and violence: “The money changes everything if you can stomach it / And if you can stomach it / You will swallow anything,” he sings, and later the song’s conclusion is brutally honest, as he screams: “I’ve seen the atrocity with my own eyes / You cannot tell me what I know.”
However, beneath the despair and catharsis, there’s also a bruised version of power-pop: the excellent “Dearest One” sounds like Big Star by way of Seattle, and while “Gifthorse” begins with a circular pattern reminiscent of Weezer‘s “Sweater Song”, the languid verses build up to majestic choruses suffused with melodies designed to stick in your head and stay there.
Golden Caravan concludes with the soft touch of “Sugar Pill”, which edges towards a country twang. The song moves at an almost glacial pace. Still, Clifford squeeze so much emotion and grit out of the song that the slower tempo and deliberate unfolding seem inevitable and the only possible choice.
Clifford’s sounds are drawn from a multitude of influences, yet the resulting combination is focused, unique, and often spellbinding. Golden Caravan is the kind of record you want to shove into the faces of anyone who has the gall to suggest that there are no truly great, revolutionary bands out there.
<!–
–>