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| Clinic |
Walking With Thee
by robert whiteman
1.30.2002
Hey guys, its Wednesday, and you know what that means: The Onion comes out, Charles Barkley’s on TNT, and the British music press is prematurely ejaculating all over themselves about yet another Next Big Thing rock band.
"...a cool sound, and Clinic is smart enough not to reduce it to mere formula." |
This week it’s Clinic who, if you believe the hype, are some sort of costumed, genetically divine cross between Radiohead and the Strokes. That’s unfair. For one thing it’s over-praise sure to inspire backlash, and secondly it’s not exactly true. Yes, they’ve been known to wear surgical masks (although they claim to have recently kicked the habit). And sure, like Radiohead, they combine electronics and sophisticated production with their guitar-rock, and like the Strokes, their sound is heavily indebted to Lower East side hipsters like the Velvet Underground and Television, but Clinic’s sound is nothing if not unique. Significantly noisier than both of the aforementioned critically acclaimed reference points, Clinic sounds if anything more like a bigger, lusher, louder, more refined version of seminal and minimal synth-punk duo Suicide. So in other words, if Suicide sounded nothing like Suicide, they might sound like Clinic.
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| Walking With Thee |
It’s a cool sound, and Clinic is smart enough not to reduce it to mere formula. Eerie, malevolent, chaotic one minute and hauntingly quiet the next – their second proper LP, Walking With Thee, finds them switching gears smoothly between keyboard and beat-loop driven mantras and thrashing guitar dissonance, always with a malevolent Frank Black wail to lead-singer Ade Blackburn's vocals. The overall effect is hypnotically disconcerting, like watching a junkie nod in and out of an argument with himself.
Unfortunately, Clinic’s songs aren’t as instantly memorable as their sound. Once the daze wears off, one is hard-pressed to remember exactly what Clinic were being so creepy about. There are standouts - the beautiful and haunting final track, “For the Wars,” in particular – but in the end Walking With Thee feels more like a collection of incredible riffs, disturbing atmospherics, and inventive arrangements than it does an album of great songs. That’s okay though, they’ll have plenty of time to improve on this promising start once all the Next Big Thing hyperbole dies down.
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