Clinic - Do It!

Spiky, sparkling, scrabble-brained and special stuff

Prickly grapplers Clinic are without a doubt one of the more inventive acts around and, five albums into their career, there’s little evidence of the ideas slowing down. This time, they’re calling it a “summer album”, which, in typical style, means less of the picnics’n’flowers and more of the taut, gritted-teeth delivery of frontman Ade Blackburn who, as ever, sounds rather like he’s stubbed his toe on the mic-stand just as the recording lights have come on.

With that kind of unsettling energy placed atop a set of songs that range from pulsating acid-soaked rock (none more effective than on The Witch (Made To Measure) and The Runaway Shopping Bag), to a more psychedelic, tuneful 60s vibe (Free Not Free), there’s a huge and ghostly, whispering, yelping eeriness at play that marks Clinic out as something quite special. This is acid through the looking glass; mutant melodies that are barely controllable in whichever world these crumbling and wide-eyed music-makers skilfully skulk.

4 stars 4 stars 4 stars 4 stars

Domino | WIGCD 165

Reviewed by Joe Shooman
<< Back to Issue 349

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