Free Reign

Liverpool\'s Clinic continues wandering the sonic landscape with a series of left turns that make its music exciting and unpredictable. Over the years, its atmospheres have altered and priorities have shifted, but there\'s still a soulful psychedelia at the heart of everything Clinic does. Oneohtrix Point Never\'s Daniel Lopatin mixed two tracks (\"Miss You\" and \"You\"), and the added beats and ripping bass lines provide a danceable option that isn\'t always available from these art-punk aesthetes. \"For the Season\" is more in line with its ethereal ventures, striking a balance between space-rock and folk music without tipping into cliché. \"Misty\" evokes further space travel, with guitar lines that arrive from an airy echo and vocals that tiptoe atop the mix. \"See Saw\" brings a skeletal punkish attack, with further touches of weirdness worthy of a late-\'60s Donovan album. \"Cosmic Radiation\" drops in for a short take on \'70s Krautrock. 

Clinic's seventh album sees them in truly idiosyncratic form, marrying the incorporating the simple, childlike melodies and spacious nature of 2010's Bubblegum with a newly acquired powerful, visceral and rhythmically-charged edge.

The enigmatic Liverpool band returns with an album heavy on Suicide-like groove and open-ended jams. The choice of  Daniel Lopatin of Oneohtrix Point Never as mixer adds an additional element of experimentation.

Over the past 15 years, Clinic have carved out a distinctive niche in the rock ’n’ roll landscape.

Though Clinic have made subtle yet noticeable changes to their sound on every album, the foundations of their music are so consistent -- chugging rhythms, an air of mystery -- that they get a somewhat unfair reputation for being samey.

Now on their seventh LP, Clinic’s career has spanned a period in which rock that combines innovation and poppiness has become increasingly thin on the ground; but the Liverpudlians have always been hovering on the margins, quietly producing record after record of eccentric, leftfield, yet decidedly un-ostentatious indie. The key lies in their mining of influences that tend to be underappreciated by most pop-inspired guitar acts: Can, Neu! and the Monks, for example, are all shoehorned into Free Reign’s deliberately sketchy collision of catchiness and obliquity.

Clinic are as known-quantity as a band can get. They are one of those antidote bands designed for fans who get mad when a band evolves too much. If they are changing, it’s at a scarcely detectable speed, like an exciting glacier (apologies to any geolog

ClashMusic: Read an album review of 'Free Reign' by Liverpool band Clinic on Domino, released on 12th November 2012.

With its psychedelic textures and evocations of space travel and eternal love, Free Reign could be considered Clinic’s hippie album.

The seventh album from Liverpudlian psych-rockers Clinic treads a line between musical stricture and freedom, writes <strong>Tom Hughes</strong>