Do It!
Clinic may be the only psychedelic freak-out band on the planet that perform wearing surgical masks and Hawaiian shirts, but they don’t rely on gimmicks or trendy tricks to make their interesting music. They do it the old fashioned way: with varied musical textures, an affection for layering, distortion and repetitive grooves, mind-bending imagery, and really glorious guitar sounds. *Do It!*, the Liverpool band’s fifth album, isn’t much of a departure from albums past, but that may be the point. A few tracks like “Mary and Eddie” start out as one thing and end as another, but the steady, high voltage charge of tracks like “Memories,” “The Witch,” and “Winged Wheel” carry the collection, carving bottomless grooves with layers of reverberating, acidic guitar, insistent, ominous floor toms, and bass drums beating as if on a war path. Singer Ade Blackburn sounds like a desperate, netherworld voice looking for the light; haunted tones of vintage keyboards and pianos, whispered vocal parts mixed in like an instrumental track, and occasional bongos and jingling bells create a colorful soundscape for a mind trip. The full-on garage punk assault of “Shopping Bag,” and the sinister overtones of “Corpus Christie” and “High Coin” are superb Clinic creations.
Despite the fact that there's still some old reliable structures underpinning Do It!, this new album might be Clinic's most adventurous since Internal Wrangler.
Fans would be forgiven for thinking they've already heard Do It! before they even press play: The studio gloss of Walking With Thee aside, Clinic has been turning out not-so-subtle variations on Internal Wrangler for nearly a decade, and once again, Do It! doesn't tinker much with the formula. Luckily, the "if it…
Clinic chug along like a coal-burning engine churning out thick black smoke on Do It!, working further into their cryptically dour art-punk/psych/soul/folk niche.
The songs here may not have the skeezy authenticity of the Velvet Underground’s 7-minute opus “Heroin,” but they’re still unsettling.
Critics are loathe to put down Clinic. Perhaps it's the band's unassailable style, which hits all of our erogenous zones