Two girls in matching blue dresses sit on high leather bar stools. They look like they're waiting for something, although it's hard to tell as the photo cuts their bodies off at the shoulders. They seem at once glamorous (airhostess killing time between flights perhaps?) and everyday (or waitresses taking the weight off after a twelve hour shift maybe?). They're sporting matching black leather high heels and black leather gloves - more glamour, you think. But the gloves are bulky industrial things. They'll be unblocking drains with those beauties. Or chopping-up bodies.
Such is the impeccably air-brushed, knowingly gritty world of Client, the electropop duo consisting of Client A (Kate Holmes, ex of Technique and Frazier Chorus, on electronics) and Client B (Sarah Blackwood, ex of Dubstar, on vocals). They're one of those rare propositions in British Pop - A Great Idea On Paper. Everything about them makes meticulous sense. Their music is sleek and inertia-less, perfect parabolas of 21st century melody, while the vocals are blunt and northern, dripping with boredom and underachievement. The kitchen sink Kraftwerk, if you like. Every Great Idea On Paper can be boiled down to a three word pitch after all.
Often, it works, leaping off the page and becoming something you'd actually want to slip into your state of the art entertainment hub at the end of a hard day shredding documents. "Don't Call Me Baby" documents Client B as she waits for her lover to telephone, precise chords chiming as she sighs out disappointment. "Radio" glides through chip strewn high streets and mildewed front rooms, intoning "time won't stop the hours fly/I watch my life slipping by" like Black Box Recorder retweaked by Neil Tennant. You understand the point immediately. The more lush the instrumentation, the more mundane and defeated the lyricism.
But they don't always stick to the plot. Which is your regulation blessing and curse. When they switch the roles (music becomes dirty and libidinous, vocals turn hard and knowing), on a song like "Come On" or "In It For The Money", they tap into the decidedly filthy subtext suggested by those leather gloves. "You know you want me baby," semi-growls Client B on the former, sneering her way through seduction, while the latter could be Belle De Jour's diary with a disco beat (Debussy being so last century). "Work hard?" she frowns. "Why should I?" It's a welcome broadening of the Grand Concept, but you can't help think: "Hmm, Goldfrapp."
Of the songs starring the former Libertines, Carl Barat's "Pornography" wins out over Peter Doherty's "Down To The Underground" (both written by Client, in case you were wondering), simply because "Pornography" has a swing and a twisted heart whereas "Down To The Underground" doesn't seem to be about anything at all and Peter appears a little lost. In many ways, "Pornography" is the perfect Client song - sounds like it's dripping with perversion, knee deep in bad thoughts and restrictive clothing, when in fact it's about the joys of monogamy.
Will Client be a success? They've known failure before - even written a brilliant song about it on here called "Rock'N'Roll", which conspires to sound like anything but its title. But we've seen fellow travellers like Black Box Recorder attempt exactly this and stumble. Having just cracked the upper reaches of the top 30 in the traditionally quiet sales month of January, the duo must be feeling cautiously optimistic. Whether having a Good Idea On Paper turns out to be enough in this curiously ideas-phobic climate remains to be seen.
