Clarence Clarity's 'No Now' Takes Incoherence To A New Level

Easily one of the more obscure albums I’ve ever listened to, 'No Now' is the debut effort from Clarance Clarity.  Unfortunately his music is no way near as brilliant as his name.

You want to encourage difference, and this is something in abundance throughout 'No Now'. The traditional format of producing songs has been thrown from the window, with scratchy, beat-heavy numbers rolling without structure in the usual places of verses and choruses. I wanted to like the album because of its sheer strangeness, but it was simply painful to listen to.

Understanding lyrics isn’t always imperative to enjoying music – I like La Femme’s music and unless they’re singing about “il pleut”, “je suis malade” or any other French GSCE fodder then their lyrics are lost on me – but Clarity’s mumblings and screamings on "With No Fear" and "Porn Mountain" (but to scratch the surface) leave you confused. Too often 'No Now' is incoherent to the point of frustration, with the sheer bizarreness losing it’s novelty factor halfway through second track "Will to Believe".

The occasional Dev Hynes-esque guitar riff can be heard, but all to often than not it just sounds as if Clarity has recorded a series of jingles and linked them with excessive distortion. "Meadow Hopping, Traffic Stopping, Death Splash" flirts with the notion of being a decent pop song, but one track doesn’t make an album.

Clarity’s live show is something pretty special, as the obscurity of his music is befitting for his strange stage persona. But this unfortunately doesn’t transcend to record.  'No Now' isn’t something I’ll be diving into again anytime soon.

For all things Clarence Clarity, click
here. Words by Luke Forshaw

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