Bubblegum
Clinic’s sixth album in a decade finds the Liverpudlians trading in some of their lysergic accoutrements for slightly easier, poppier stylings. As the title might imply, the songs here are lighter than *Bubblegum*’s psych-pop predecessors: opening track “I’m Aware” swirls and drifts with a gentler guitar sound and willowy strings, and others — like the sweet, sanguine “Baby” and the acoustic-flavored “Forever (Demis’ Blues)” — evoke ‘60s names like the Zombies and Donovan, rather than the Velvet Underground or the Seeds. Clinic do get their psych-groove on, however, with colorful guitar pin-wheeling, surreal clouds of dulcimer and chugging wha-wha on tracks like “Evelyn,” “Another Way of Giving,” and “Orangutan,” and they kick out the jams on harder tracks like “Lion Tamer.” Instead of writing songs based on a rhythm or a groove as they’ve done in the past, here the band began with specific melodies and chords; it’s that focus on the whole of a song that gives *Bubblegum* its delightful — but never sweet or cloying — vibe that recalls the magical days of AM radio.
UK cult band Clinic continue to make dependably good music, here continuing their ongoing exploration of vintage psychedelia.
Liverpool’s Clinic is one of the most strangely reliable groups out there—reliable in that a template was established early, and strange in that the template is all over the place. A typical Clinic album zigzags among snarling garage-rock thrash, honeyed British folk, and vehicles for Ade Blackburn’s floating melodica…
At first, longtime Clinic fans might think that Bubblegum is an ironic title -- after all, the band spent so much of their career forging clangorous, mysterious, art-punk that it seems impossible that anything overtly poppy or catchy would enter their surgery scrub-clad minds, much less their music.