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Do It!

by

Clinic

 
Do It!
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Avg: 4.0 (12 ratings)

Clinic continues to make wonderful, unsettling things happen with their purposefully limited tools.

  • We Say...

    Review by Andrew Perry

    For ten years now, Clinic have been chipping away at their own mentally unstable breed of garage psychedelia, oblivious to its relative trendiness at any given time and seemingly even less hassled by any woolly muso notions of “progression.” After four albums and two singles collections, 2008’s Do It arrived sounding exactly like they always do — primitive, macabre, ageless. The sense of déjà vu-doo is intentional, even down to the album’s sole out-and-out thrasher, "Shopping Bag," arriving at track five, just as it did on 2006’s Visitations. Spooky!

    This Liverpudlian quartet do not, however, eternally retread safe ground, à la Status Quo. Yes, their musical means are limited: on "Corpus Christi," the razor-edged lead guitar follows a dum-dum simple bass line, note for note, just as the 13th Floor Elevators and countless other Nuggets-era bozos prescribed it. They clearly believe in the Julian Cope idea that anything worth doing on a guitar can be achieved with boxing gloves on, while tripping on premium-strength Owsley LSD. It’s their aesthetic choice: when I once spoke to their guiding light, Ade Blackburn, he declared that he knew what he liked, and wouldn’t go changing any time soon.

    However, within their minuscule sliver of the infinite sonic landscape, time and again Clinic make wonderful — and deeply unsettling — things happen. Surrounded by rustling maracas, neo-’60s FX-ed axes and a toffee-thick organ which might as well come with a free lava lamp, Blackburn is a worryingly unfathomable presence. He sings of the sparkling joys of reminiscence ("Memories") and sinister sorcery ("The Witch (Made To Measure)") with the same trembling compulsion. The deeper you get into Do It, the less valuable other styles of music seem. Really, Ade, keep ’em coming, just as you like ’em.

  • They Say...

    Review by Heather Phares, All Music Guide

    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. Almost suffocating distortion is one of Do It!'s main motifs, along with songs that swing from mood to mood rapidly. "Memories" uses both, shifting from heavy, ugly, deeply acidic psych-garage riffs to melancholy organs and autoharps as Ade Blackburn intones "Memories are all you own" (though it sounds more like he's singing "Memories are all you're on," comparing thoughts to drugs à la the Electric Prunes' "I Had Too Much to Dream Last Night"). "Free Not Free" is nearly as trippy, jumping between brash riffs and mellow flutes while setting lyrics like "when the hoax is in the mirror" to one of the album's prettiest melodies. All of this is to say that despite Do It!'s direct name, Clinic are as elliptical as ever. They're rarely better than when they're telling someone off, even if they do it so cryptically that the feeling is the only thing that translates. "High Coin" sounds like the perfect soundtrack to skewering a voodoo doll, its sinister organ drones giving words such as "You stitch who you always wanted/Now your thoughts begin to fray" an extra malice. Visitations' elaborately dark atmosphere gets more focus on Do It!, with "Tomorrow"'s creaky, cranky acoustics and "Mary and Eddie"'s electronically enhanced steamboat shanty providing some of the spookiest, and best, moments. It all culminates on "Coda," where Blackburn explains that the album is a celebration of "the 600th anniversary of the Bristol Charter" and urges listeners to "let go of the rail" (probably not a good idea) as several chapels' worth of church bells ring out. Do It! finds Clinic getting curiouser and curiouser, but that's the direction that suits them best.

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