Clinic - Do It! Review

Clinic are something of a rock in the field of independent music, nowhere near as porous as many of their contemporaries. Do It!, bold title and all, contains some weird and wonderful music, staying true to the Clinic blueprint in one sense, while on the other showing renewed vigour for new sounds and approaches.

This doesn't mean the Liverpool quintet have completely renounced their previous style. Memories, with its stomping gait, confirms they retain the penchant for distorted rocking, despite the weird waltz interludes that break it up. Shopping Bag, too, reinforces the feeling of standing next to the speakers as the band gig in an aircraft hanger, the squealing harmonica up front in the mix but the drums and bass further afield....full text 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. Granted, that's a pretty specific niche, but as on their previous album, Visitations, it feels more like a groove than a rut. More than most bands, Clinic write songs in styles, and Do It! features most of their quintessential types: the excellent "Corpus Christi" is a menacing, whispery slow-burner like Walking with Thee's "Come into Our Room" before it, with a singsong lilt that makes it all the creepier; "Emotions" is one of Clinic's soulful ballads, this time boasting a thick fuzz bassline that runs through the song like a scratch; and "Shopping Bag" is this album's version of the band's noise-punk outbursts, now with a shrieking saxophone solo. While Do It! doesn't abandon Clinic's well-defined sound and approach, it does underscore how they innovate within their self-imposed limitations, even if they don't make radical changes....full text More than almost any group out there, Clinic make you question how integral change is to a band's vitality. If you don't own any of their music, buying all their albums and listening to each and every one of their songs in alphabetical order (an undertaking that'd take less than four hours, B-sides included) wouldn't tell you much less about their career's arc than a chronological study would. The formula they hinted at on 1997 debut single "IPC Subeditors Dictate Our Youth" and got down to a science on 2000's Internal Wrangler has expanded only slightly, and while there've been some noticeable shifts in production style (especially on 2002's crisp and glossy Walking With Thee), there's not much that sonically separates a decade-old Clinic song from what they're up to today....full text