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Published on 7/25/08
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Though the four Liverpudlians in Clinic hide behind surgical masks, they come across more as bandits or blood-letting barbers than ER healers, more in league with Dr. Strange than Dr. McDreamy. That occult air bubbles up from the band’s swampy garage rock: an enchanting spell brewed with ingredients pirated from the global underground of the 1960s.
Clinic’s formula has varied little over five albums but continues to sail into more organic, antique and oriental waters. When a band sounds like no other on earth, it’s far more forgivable to hear them fail to develop, merely tinkering away and wandering the desert like some Bedouin Ramones.
Dim flames of surf rock, tropicalia, spaghetti westerns and Joujouka trance flicker in Clinic’s velvet underground. Their steam punk engine runs on three speeds—sock-hop slow dance, camel gallop and sandstorm thrash—but details color between the lines more than in prior albums. Bells, fog horns, gongs, chimes and zithers pop like firecrackers as Ade Blackburn sings through clenched teeth and populates his vague poems with magicians, witches, fortune-tellers, eyeballs and gold. It’s not all arcane: When he repeatedly exhales “joy of living” in a chorus, he sells it.
All this would add up to just a wet dream for record geeks, but doo-wop harmonies imbue universal, haunting soul. Other bands before, such as Sigur Rós and Cocteau Twins, similarly managed to tingle spines despite indecipherability. Clinic operates in vapor while putting listeners under. On second thought, it might not be pharmaceutical, but this quartet never fails to raise spirits.
