The Brits still tout their ‘feel-good music deranged’, a bricolage scavenged from exotica and 1950s rock.
The eccentrics of Clinic are visionaries. Always one step ahead when it comes to recording on vinyl the oddities of existence. And that has lasted for nearly thirty years. Should we remind that the former Liverpool quartet already made wearing a surgical mask mandatory by the end of the 1990s, two decades before its widespread and generalized use across the globe? But time has passed. And reality has relentlessly caught up with them.
How, then, to continue expressing the world’s absurdity when it competes in ingenuity to reach peaks of aberration without even concealing it? The answer comes with this tenth album faithful to Clinic’s spirit, still as concise (almost all songs fall under 2 minutes and 30 seconds) as it is inclassifiable, lucid and sarcastic—a sort of ghost train masquerading as a palace of laughter, or the reverse, the kind of thing that could invoke Alan Vega and Danny Martin, or confuse Lux Interior with Les Baxter.
From Analog DIY to a Dub-leaning Tilt
Five years after Fantasy Island, the English duo Ade Blackburn/Jonathan Hartley carries on with their analog bricolage leaning toward dub, and takes up, in their own way, the rock of the 1950s, growing increasingly fond of the uncanny, cardboard-cut exotica’s strangeness. In short, a ‘feel-good music deranged’ as the album’s cover proclaims from the start. Serious entertainment for a world that’s absurd.
Wild in the Streets (Domino/Sony Music). Out on October 30.
