By Kimberly Chun

NOWADAYS THE WORDS "Cool Britannia" don't mean much – Oasis maybe come to mind, rejected Union Jack boxers, the title of a long-forgotten song by the Bonzo Dog Doo-Dah Band, a junked Ben & Jerry's ice-cream flavor, and a fading fever dream of an ad slogan.

But back in the day, all of six years ago, when the phrase was in full flower, the cool appellation might easily have been applied to London three-piece the Clientele. Vocalist-guitarist Alasdair MacLean was a man with a plan. He believed the advertising. As Liam Gallagher and Damon Albarn played on, MacLean – fresh-faced, optimistic, and all of 21 years old – was biding his time, developing his band's clear-eyed, hazy-day psych pop and bracing himself for the group's assault on the unsuspecting English music charts. The three unassuming college graduates from the London suburb of Fleet were going to be big. They were going to show all those neo-British Invasion pop bands how it should be done, dancing lightly along the "surreal, very elegant edge of Britpop," as MacLean puts it.

"We wanted to be a corrective to all that. We wanted to show people how Blur were misinterpreting the Kinks," the erudite 28-year-old vocalist says, sending a small self-mocking chuckle over the phone lines from the U.K.

It didn't quite work out that way. Instead the band slogged through years of obscurity – as most bands are wont to do – and MacLean tussled with a copywriting job that was driving him nutso. Then in 1999, "Lacewings," a Japanese single on Motorway, caught on with stateside Britpop connoisseurs, and the cool accolades finally started blowing toward Clientele.

Which was when, MacLean says, "people started to be as excited about us as we were about ourselves, which was refreshing at the time because we'd just started wondering if we'd gone mad and, in fact, we were crap, because no one in Britain really cared at all. Then shortly after the single came out, all the kinds of massed Belle and Sebastian fans heard about us and that meant that our gigs were never empty anymore." The Clientele's latest Bay Area appearance Sept. 17 is likely to follow suit.

After all, it's their hour. Their studio debut, The Violet Hour (Merge), has gathered praise as an "album that dissolves like a daydream and aches like a jilted bride," according to a writer for the U.K's Guardian. Taking its name from T.S. Eliot's "The Wasteland," The Violet Hour chimes in with Velvet-y, almost droning guitars and feather-soft vocals by MacLean and a gentle, sweetly paced swing generated by drummer-pianist Mark Keen and bassist James Hornsey. Unassuming and almost vaporous where other bands go fuzzed-out or angular, the Clientele's music threatens to melt in your mouth like a lozenge, mixing in flavors of group favorites like Galaxie 500, Felt, Love, Slint, and Nick Drake. What takes it beyond standard indie rock are the Clientele's strange choices – the emerald green shag rather than the beige – thatched with melodies that sometimes seep into the carpet of your consciousness like so much spilt ice tea.

The album title, and its evocation of that suspenseful moment between dusk and darkness, summed up Clientele's favorite mood, MacLean says, reeling off Eliot's poem like the literature major he once was. "That slightly eerie feeling of being a little bit beside yourself, I think really feeds into the whole sound."

From the start, the band have looked to the past's sights and sounds. The lyrics are the stuff of weather, ghosts, and memory. "Voices in the Mall," for instance, brings back the atmosphere of a childhood shopping trip with MacLean and his mother, made very early in the morning "with the rain beating against a glass roof in a sort of dark winter morning and that feeling of being stuck in the middle of nowhere." "The guy who wrote The Go-Between, L.P. Hartley, said, 'The past is a foreign country – they do things differently there,' " MacLean muses, "and that sense of dislocation from the past, that there's something missing, that there isn't an easy continuity between the past and present – I think that's part of that feeling of not really being yourself properly."

Failing to make that splash at the top of the pops, the group released a steady succession of EPs and singles on labels such as March, Acuarela, and Pointy and appeared on a healthy handful of compilations. Yet the short-form focus was all a matter of finances, not pop design, so when the Clientele were finally offered money for The Violet Hour, after the success of the 2000 compilation of their singles and EPs, Suburban Light (Merge), they ran out and bought a load of '70s analog equipment to make the album, which, says MacLean, "sounds like fun, but it's crap because it keeps blowing up and getting spare parts is a nightmare." Next time he hopes to record at a "higher-fi" studio, perhaps using a string quartet along the lines of a Bartók ensemble.

"We try to add as many surprises and little bits and pieces as we can," he explains. "I really hate that kind of very banal simplicity that other British bands like Coldplay seem to exhibit, because there's just no subtlety there. Subtlety is one of the primary aesthetics of the Clientele, I think – to its fault, really, because that means a lot of people don't actually get what we're about the first time they listen to us."

Once that happens, perhaps something strangely seductive, and maybe even sexy in that "Cool Britannia" way, starts to rub off on the Clientele's ballads of the 'burbs. "About 70 percent of American gentlemen or boys who come up and speak to me about our record tell me that they use our record as an aid to seduction, which is very strange," MacLean quips. "If they do that, and if any children are conceived while our music is playing, I just hope they name them Alasdair."