Clare & The Reasons
The Movie

Summer 2014: a period that, among other things, I will also remember for the gracefulness, lightness, and ostentatious retro (but also a bit posh, as they say in England) aura of my listens; Olive, Pink Martini, Jon Brion, and also Clare & The Reasons, the musical project of New York couple Clare Muldaur and Olivier Manchon, which debuted in 2007 with this "The Movie". Light and carefree music but with a decidedly elegant approach, elegant and also very composed, a characteristic that makes it perfect for those moments when you don't feel like doing or even thinking about anything, not even indulging in some lively rhythm; excellent music for lazy people, in short, and as a lazy person myself, I say it as a compliment.

The stylish and evocative cover gives a clear hint of the distinctly vintage character of "The Movie", which elegantly navigates between bossa nova, predominantly '60s European-style pop, lounge music, and very relaxed folk. A wide array of musicians and orchestral instrumentation, important collaborations with acclaimed singer-songwriter Sufjan Stevens, and legendary arranger Van Dyke Parks, but despite this, the album does not sound baroque at all; sophisticated, elegant, also ambitious but always with lightness and a soft step. Clare Muldaur, the author of all the songs on the album, is a singer with a thin, expressive, and relaxed tone, always pleasant and never tiring, excessive, or over the top, and an eccentric and original enough songwriter; "Pluto" is the most evident demonstration with a lyric that aims to ideally console the celestial body of the same name after the loss of its planetary status, an original and brilliant idea for a beautiful song that introduces the listener to the mood of "The Movie" with a flirtatious jazzy melody and a changeable and valuable orchestral work, a characteristic found in almost all tracks of this album. Despite its adorable underlying indolence, "The Movie" is full of brilliance and vitality, in a somewhat peculiar form but still so; in my opinion, the highest and most representative point of the work is "Alphabet City", a melodically perfect ballad endowed with an elegant theatricality that allows it to stand out in all its languid and dreamy splendor, but also "Science Fiction Man", accompanied by the trembling and always suggestive sound of the harpsichord, manages to impress and fascinate with great effectiveness.

Not only great peaks but a perfect amalgam, cemented by the ecstatic and idyllic atmospheres of "Under The Water", "Cook For You", "Go Back", and "Love Can Be A Crime", similar in their slowness and extreme care of sounds and melodies but each with its own mood and peculiarities, forming a very sinuous and buttery backbone.

If she wanted, Clare could have let herself go a bit more, daring a slightly more lively and colorful atmosphere; when she tries, the result is the adorable "Rodi" with its graceful choruses and a pleasantly summery and carefree atmosphere; with another two or three episodes of this kind, "The Movie" would have been a bit more complete but this too is a precise stylistic choice.
After all, this deliberate and continually reiterated slowness is an integral part of the charm of an album of great class, an original and in its own way brilliant praise of laziness.