Amor de Dias - The House At Sea

If Amor de Dias, who number The Clientele’s Alasdair MacLean and Pipas’ Lupe Nunez-Fernandez, showed on their debut ties to The Clientele’s last album, Bonfires on the Heath, by sharing a song, Harvest Time, it definitely wasn’t a Clientele album under a different name.

Amor de Dias’ second album, The House At Sea, is more different still: it’s the sound of the band fulfilling their cultured, poetic potential. Their pastoral shadings have given way to something brighter and stronger and fresher. And it’s all their own.

The House At Sea was realised in a more concentrated session than 2011’s Street of the Love of Days. And it shows. It’s a record that sustains an aesthetic – melody and melancholy, like Galaxie 500 or those early 80s Felt LPs – throughout its course. There’s something in here, too, of The Chills in combining psychedelia’s claustrophobia with a sense of space. And in Maureen, they've captured Broadcast's enigma and set it sail somewhere between Hampshire and Madrid.

But The House At Sea breathes its own air. It’s another world where traditional Spanish guitars meet English folk’s flintiness and where the sun is always either setting or rising. There’s even a pop song in Jean’s Waving, which reinvents The Clientele’s Jerry in Amor de Dias’ image.