The Clear Saint is a band consisting of one: songwriter Christopher St. Clair, who plays all instruments on “mrs peel,” which he also produced and mastered. His music is a hybrid of late-sixties harmonic sensibilities with brief interjections of what he likes to call “deconstructed patterns” and neo-folk looking toward electronica, with a combination of programmed beats and organic percussion, synthesized and acoustic instruments. St. Clair makes it a point to avoid easy melodic structures or hooks, focusing instead on atmospherics and meaningful lyrics. The lyrics serve introspective themes and strive for poetic imagery. No instrument is ever predominant, and the voice is used as an unobtrusive part of the whole. “These are songs of someone who’s reached a definite point along the road but remains completely ambivalent about what he’s seen and experienced,” says St. Clair. “In terms of sound, Ideally, I’d like to slowly transform into a writer whose music sounds as if early David Crosby had been produced by Massive Attack.”
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