When I first heard the name Patrick Cleandenim, it was 2003 and Cleandenim was an 18-year-old high school senior playing in a now defunct Radiohead-inspired trio called Clockwork and readying an EP of solo material. After graduation, the young singer/songwriter left his native Lawrence, Kansas for New York City’s East Village. Based on the promise shown in a creative piece that saw him reading poetry into Lawrence High surveillance cameras, Cleandenim was awarded a scholarship to study art at The Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art. The prestigious program and daily life in Manhattan have clearly had a tremendous impact on Cleandenim, who is now 21 and expected to graduate this spring. His debut full-length, Baby Comes Home, is to be released on Manchester, England-based label Broken Horse this month, and great things are clearly in store. Beyond being the best record to have ever emerged from Lawrence, a college town with ties to a diversity of artists including Mates of State, Get Up Kids, Beulah, and Butterglory among many others, it’s simply one of the best albums to come around in ages. Possessing a kind of cinematic grandeur rarely realized in pop’s past, Baby Comes Home is the surprise of 2007.

Like a cavalcade of dancing Disney skeletons, the title track moves to the beat of boney vibraphones. Typewriter clicks inject a conceptual flourish, imagining Cleandenim as a Mary Shelley or Bram Stoker figure, and by the song’s end, cascading brass lines give way to a descending staircase of sandy, tremolo strings. “Baby,” we deduce, is a creature of the night, and “Home” is a sarcophagus.

A standout among an album of standouts, “Cognac & Caviar” is sheer bliss. Evoking images of whirring taxicabs and glistening skyscraper glass, the track projects an air of giddy swagger reminiscent of the early Oasis singles. Cleandenim is an admitted student of the old masters, and “Until You Said I’m Gone” finds him at his most Bacharachian. Hustling and shuffling like a Fred Astaire Broadway routine, a simple arrangement reveals the production wizardry of Black Lodge studio ace Nick Day. Proving himself to be a master of reverb application, Day creates a sound more evocative of the famed Capitol Records reverb chamber than the digital environment the album was actually crafted in. The engineer/producer’s talents should have artists local and national alike racing to Black Lodge for sessions.

The album’s penultimate track, “Days Without Rain,” is an unequivocal masterpiece. Having already won high praise from London’s widely read Time Out magazine for its Scott Walker swoon, the song recalls the simultaneous grandeur and terror of watching the sun rise in vast, unfamiliar stretches of city. A serpentine string line is juxtaposed with a swinging drumbeat, ecstatic piano, panoramic, multi-tracked vocals, sleighbells, vibraphone, and yet another sophisticated brass arrangement. Not one note of the deluge gets lost in the mix, and for the first time, singer Alessa McCoy’s voice edges its way to the forefront. McCoy functions as the album’s secret weapon, melding with Cleandenim’s already rich delivery to form a haunting tone.

“Interlude” is just that – a wisely placed pause from the album’s otherwise relentlessly lush orchestration that leads us into side two. “Rocket to the Moon” and “Birds of Fashion” are further testament to Cleandenim’s rapid growth and emergence as a formidable arranger. Each cut would have been at home in the days of Bobby Darrin, Dion DiMucci, and other late ’50s and early 60’s songwriters who blurred the lines between doo-wop and rock and roll. Perhaps most indicative of Cleandenim’s seemingly encyclopedic knowledge of the history of popular music is “Whispers Only Hurt Them,” which dials up the loveable one-offs of lesser-studied acts such as Jay and the Americans, and Eric Burdon and the Animals.

Nine spots deep into the tracklisting, “So You Think You’re Gonna Live Forever” is an oblique return to the theme of the title track and delivers as another perfect pop song at a moment when one might expect the album to transition into a more subdued finish. One of the most striking things about Baby Comes Home is that it succeeds both as an album in the classic sense of the word, and as a collection of individual songs. For a debut, it’s practically a Greatest Hits. With the exception of “Interlude,” every track could be a single. Like debuts by The Strokes, Oasis, and even The Beatles, Baby Comes Home is a wall-to-wall clinic in songwriting.

Just as Beirut’s impossibly young and talented Zach Condon is beginning to move away from the charming, faux-eastern-European sound of his own debut Gulagorkestar, Patrick Cleandenim is already conducting experiments in style and instrumentation, so enjoy Baby Comes Home while it’s still the centerpiece of his repertoire. It’s an instant classic – a page from pop’s golden era brought to life in the 21st century.

Patrick Cleandenim Official Site