Encountering Clinic for the first time can be an intoxicating experience. Four faintly threatening Liverpudlians in surgeons’ masks, they make a clammy, intense kind of buzz-pop. Trebly, fuzzy and shot through with rickety guitars and melodicas, this, they imply, is how The Velvet Underground would have sounded had they recorded at Black Ark studios.
For those of us who’ve followed Clinic’s career since 1997, the idea remains appealing in principle. In practice, however, there’s a suspicion on “Winchester Cathedral”, Clinic’s third album, that their narrow and claustrophobic sound is close to being exhausted. It starts promisingly, with heart monitor blips accelerating into the familiar gallop of “Country Mile”, Ade Blackburn hissing invocations between the clanging and nagging riffs.
There’s an interesting experiment going on here, with the band endeavouring to capture the weirdness of English arcana without resort to clichéd bucolic instrumentation. Ancient, whimsical and possibly sinister rituals can be enacted by garage bands as well as folk musicians, evidently. And, if you’ve never heard Clinic before, it’ll probably sound terrific, from the tremulous organ instrumental “Vertical Takeoff”, through the NYC-punk ramalam of “WDYYB” to the brittle and lovely “Falstaff”. Older fans, though, might be wondering how many more Clinic albums they can buy that sound exactly like this, that operate at such a tense and sustained migraine frequency.
“Winchester Cathedral” is, perhaps, a more satisfying album than 2002’s “Walking With Thee” (nominated for a Grammy, astonishingly). But should you own the band’s magnificent first three singles (collected on the “Three EPs” mini-album), it’s hard to imagine you’ll ever really need another record by this conceptually brilliant, artistic dead-end of a band.
