Clinic - Do It!
Let's get this out of the way: Yes, it's their best record since "Internal Wrangler." No, it is not as good or better than "Internal Wrangler." However, this is not a back-handed way of saying, "At least it's not dead boring," as it was with 2006's "Visitations" - "Do It!" easily stands on its own as a highlight in the band's oeuvre and one of the best records of the year so far.
It's one of those records that makes you rethink the more maligned parts of the band's discography. Is the second half of "Walking With Thee" now not an overly-bright rhythmically stagnant bore? Or does "Winchester Cathedral" now make any kind of sense as an album? Are there now not at least three identical songs with different names that sound exactly like "Kimberley"? No on all counts. Looking back, however, Clinic have flat out embarrassed us with their consistency, their pigheaded determination to plow the same melodic and rhythmic furrows over and over until it seemed they were standing in trenches. They have remained singularly obsessed with the Victorian Age, the dark side of the Summer of Love, Voodoo, and ancient Egypt. They never made a "dance-punk" record. They were never photographed with ironic mustaches. They have never been remixed by an Ed Banger artist. For all the comparisons to post-punk luminaries "Internal Wrangler" invited, Clinic cast a wide enough net with that record (the decade's best?) that they have ever since sounded, simply, like themselves. Early career highlights like "Porno", "Cement Mixer" and "Distortions" may have become casualties of a desire to be uninfluenced. Whatever they've lost in the meantime (and it is quite a bit, don't get me wrong), "Do It!" is a timely reminder that they've been around for the better part of a decade expanding their vision of a psychedelic Victorian voodoo pyramid cult, and will continue to do so when today's "it" bands are long gone, just like they outlasted the "it" bands they came up with. No Age, meet Ikara Colt.
So - what's different this time? Well, for one thing, there is a marked absence of "rewrites" on this record. In the past, Clinic have literally rewritten earlier songs, seeming to say, "Hold on - we can do 'Hippie Death Suite' better..." I actually only count one blatant case of self-revision: "Tomorrow" is a more spooked, sloppy (always a good thing in Clinic's case) arrangement of "Jigsaw Man", whose percussive acoustic guitar was a new wrinkle on "Visitations" anyway. Initially, it seemed that "Emotions" would be a rewrite of "Falstaff", one of the best songs they've ever written, which itself was an extrapolation of the instrumental b-side "The Sphinx", but by the end it has taken several hard melodic and timbral turns, Ade Blackburn's sick muppet falsetto winding, serpentine, around each one and I had forgotten that it was supposed to sound like "Falstaff". "Shopping Bag" is the requisite "punk rock" song, but haven't you come to expect, even demand that Clinic include one of these on each album? It is the one trademark I hope they never jettison, and this time there's a psychotic polka beat and a skronking sax solo going throughout, making it one of the more unhinged "punk rock" songs they've ever written.
Failing to rip themselves off wouldn't singlehandedly acquit the album, however. Having proven they can at least repeat themselves with a little flair on their last record (see "If You Could Read Your Mind"), one hoped they'd finally canonize the giddy mad science of their b-sides. And, in fact, as a lumbering fuzz pedal stomp alternates with a stately organ processional in "Memories", you realize this savage majesty is just the sort of stylistic derring-do they'd previously relegated to b-sides since "Internal Wrangler". It's a welcome change of pace, as is the similarly divided single "Free Not Free". Hopefully, you're too young or too forgiving to hold the opening riff's similarity to Cake's "Going the Distance" against it, but after the song switches to a tremmed out lounge groove, you know you're going to hear that Cake riff again, probably when you least expect it. Instead of dropping it in the "least expected" (and therefore completely predictable) place, however, the melody swoons, Ade swoons with it and it catches you off guard just enough so that the riff blindsides you all over again. Oh...bra-vo, Clinic.
"Emotions", as previously mentioned, is certainly in the mold of their other slow-dance numbers, but this one is decidedly more Stygian, switching to a downright sinister key before the Flamingos style harmonies intone, "You pour your own, pour your own (etc.)...from a flask." I can honestly say I've never really known what Ade Blackburn is singing about, but I know that it consistently creeps me out in wonderful ways. "High Coin" provides a glimpse at what a tango performed by Joy Division might have sounded like, while "Mary & Eddie" has the rustic, pagan domesticity of Paul Giovanni and Magnet's soundtrack to "the Wicker Man" - these two songs are two of the record's best, simultaneously embodying and exploding what makes Clinic so Clinicky.
At a lean 32 minutes, "Do It" is also the shortest album Clinic have made since "Wrangler"'s blistering 31-minute onslaught, and that may be my only complaint - it wants another song. Then, maybe that was the point - the superstitious guys who left track 13 blank on their debut wanted to tap into the numerological powers of the number 11. "Return to form" is the wrong phrase for this triumph by a band whose faults stem from adhering too closely to form. What I propose instead is much more encouraging - "Do It!" gives us reason to believe they can continue to make this stunningly original, achingly gorgeous music for as long as they please.
It's one of those records that makes you rethink the more maligned parts of the band's discography. Is the second half of "Walking With Thee" now not an overly-bright rhythmically stagnant bore? Or does "Winchester Cathedral" now make any kind of sense as an album? Are there now not at least three identical songs with different names that sound exactly like "Kimberley"? No on all counts. Looking back, however, Clinic have flat out embarrassed us with their consistency, their pigheaded determination to plow the same melodic and rhythmic furrows over and over until it seemed they were standing in trenches. They have remained singularly obsessed with the Victorian Age, the dark side of the Summer of Love, Voodoo, and ancient Egypt. They never made a "dance-punk" record. They were never photographed with ironic mustaches. They have never been remixed by an Ed Banger artist. For all the comparisons to post-punk luminaries "Internal Wrangler" invited, Clinic cast a wide enough net with that record (the decade's best?) that they have ever since sounded, simply, like themselves. Early career highlights like "Porno", "Cement Mixer" and "Distortions" may have become casualties of a desire to be uninfluenced. Whatever they've lost in the meantime (and it is quite a bit, don't get me wrong), "Do It!" is a timely reminder that they've been around for the better part of a decade expanding their vision of a psychedelic Victorian voodoo pyramid cult, and will continue to do so when today's "it" bands are long gone, just like they outlasted the "it" bands they came up with. No Age, meet Ikara Colt.
So - what's different this time? Well, for one thing, there is a marked absence of "rewrites" on this record. In the past, Clinic have literally rewritten earlier songs, seeming to say, "Hold on - we can do 'Hippie Death Suite' better..." I actually only count one blatant case of self-revision: "Tomorrow" is a more spooked, sloppy (always a good thing in Clinic's case) arrangement of "Jigsaw Man", whose percussive acoustic guitar was a new wrinkle on "Visitations" anyway. Initially, it seemed that "Emotions" would be a rewrite of "Falstaff", one of the best songs they've ever written, which itself was an extrapolation of the instrumental b-side "The Sphinx", but by the end it has taken several hard melodic and timbral turns, Ade Blackburn's sick muppet falsetto winding, serpentine, around each one and I had forgotten that it was supposed to sound like "Falstaff". "Shopping Bag" is the requisite "punk rock" song, but haven't you come to expect, even demand that Clinic include one of these on each album? It is the one trademark I hope they never jettison, and this time there's a psychotic polka beat and a skronking sax solo going throughout, making it one of the more unhinged "punk rock" songs they've ever written.
Failing to rip themselves off wouldn't singlehandedly acquit the album, however. Having proven they can at least repeat themselves with a little flair on their last record (see "If You Could Read Your Mind"), one hoped they'd finally canonize the giddy mad science of their b-sides. And, in fact, as a lumbering fuzz pedal stomp alternates with a stately organ processional in "Memories", you realize this savage majesty is just the sort of stylistic derring-do they'd previously relegated to b-sides since "Internal Wrangler". It's a welcome change of pace, as is the similarly divided single "Free Not Free". Hopefully, you're too young or too forgiving to hold the opening riff's similarity to Cake's "Going the Distance" against it, but after the song switches to a tremmed out lounge groove, you know you're going to hear that Cake riff again, probably when you least expect it. Instead of dropping it in the "least expected" (and therefore completely predictable) place, however, the melody swoons, Ade swoons with it and it catches you off guard just enough so that the riff blindsides you all over again. Oh...bra-vo, Clinic.
"Emotions", as previously mentioned, is certainly in the mold of their other slow-dance numbers, but this one is decidedly more Stygian, switching to a downright sinister key before the Flamingos style harmonies intone, "You pour your own, pour your own (etc.)...from a flask." I can honestly say I've never really known what Ade Blackburn is singing about, but I know that it consistently creeps me out in wonderful ways. "High Coin" provides a glimpse at what a tango performed by Joy Division might have sounded like, while "Mary & Eddie" has the rustic, pagan domesticity of Paul Giovanni and Magnet's soundtrack to "the Wicker Man" - these two songs are two of the record's best, simultaneously embodying and exploding what makes Clinic so Clinicky.
At a lean 32 minutes, "Do It" is also the shortest album Clinic have made since "Wrangler"'s blistering 31-minute onslaught, and that may be my only complaint - it wants another song. Then, maybe that was the point - the superstitious guys who left track 13 blank on their debut wanted to tap into the numerological powers of the number 11. "Return to form" is the wrong phrase for this triumph by a band whose faults stem from adhering too closely to form. What I propose instead is much more encouraging - "Do It!" gives us reason to believe they can continue to make this stunningly original, achingly gorgeous music for as long as they please.
Posts
No comments:
Post a Comment