Liverpool post-punks Clinic released a new album, “Wild in the Streets”, today via their longtime label Domino Recordings. Earlier this week they shared its third single, title track “Wild in the Streets.”
Clinic’s tenth album, sounds as if someone crossed the animation of a Halloween cartoon from the nineties with a cheap animatronic skeleton at the amusement park. Even after almost 30 years, this band from Liverpool has not lost its desire for the weird. This description doesn’t sound nice at first, but it’s meant as a compliment, because that’s exactly where the record gets its wonderful retro kitsch from. The inspirations are quite upscale in nature.
Singer Ade Blackburn and his school friend Jonathan Hartley, who was already enthusiastic about electronics and drum machines as a teenager, have recently discovered Exotica for themselves. In addition, there was dub, cabaret Voltaire and early rock’n’roll because of its immediacy. In order to create more forward momentum, a whole verse was even thrown out on some songs.
Accordingly, the 12 pieces are mostly short and carry distinctive synthesizer lines, organ, glockenspiels and flutes, plus fuzzy drums. In between, science fiction sounds whine, and nature sounds interfere. Surf rock meets world music, art-pop looks in the direction of psychedelia. The title song lures into the album with a wandering organ melody and stoic beat. “Model Citizen” then rings like a slot machine and sings about a model citizen, censors himself in the middle of his own song and demonstratively outrages himself about obscenity.
In between, it gets exhausting: In “You And I”, Blackburn’s voice sounds even more wafting and annoying than it already is, and electronic gimmicks pile up all around. In general, he moans and whispers, makes strange noises, but mostly complains shaky, almost bored. This is nerve-wracking, but it fits the overall picture.
“The Gardener” compensates for this with a little trip around the world: A wobbly synthesizer chases guitar and distorted flute, and suddenly you end up sonically first in Japan, then in Hawaii and finally back in Liverpool.
“The Time Has Come” finally pushes kitsch completely into the horror circus, before “Well Wisher” sings about carousel rides and spreads dreamy dream pop to it. In its half-hour running time, the album seems like a fantastic dream sequence. Echoes and bell arpeggios, which are already known from the last album “Fantasy Island” (2021), put listeners in a trance again and again.
But this time the band goes a different way: Instead of ironically appropriating tropical aesthetics, they stick to a sound world that suits them much better. This dark, imaginative world suits Clinic extremely well, even if colourful sprinkles break it up. There is nothing groundbreaking about “Wild In The Streets”, but the album seems coherent from the first to the last minute and fits pretty perfectly into the season. And like almost everything from Clinic, it doesn’t do exactly what is hot at the moment.
It sounds mysterious, retro and wonderfully out of time, right on the edge where there is too little going on anyway.
Previously they shared the album’s first single, “You and I,” Then they released its second single, “Energies,”
Clinic’s last album was 2021’s “Fantasy Island”, which followed 2019’s “Wheeltappers and Shunters” (which was their first new album in seven years). Clinic formed in 1997 and used to be a quartet, but since “Fantasy Island” they’ve been the duo of Ade Blackburn and Jonathan Hartley.
“We’ve known each other since school,” says Blackburn in a press release. “Hartley was always interested in electronics and drum machines, even as a teenager. He’s into rhythms, whether it’s reggae and funk or more conventional guitar music, whereas I was always into songs and melodies. I think that’s why Clinic works so well.”
Of the inspirations for “Wild in the Streets”, Blackburn says: “Something we’ve got into more recently is exotica, especially the colourful percussion. People like Martin Denny and Les Baxter. Some of that stuff is amazing. For what was often considered easy listening music, it has some very strange undercurrents. We’ve also been listening to dub reggae and things like Cabaret Voltaire. And a lot of early rock‘n’roll, for that immediacy. For many of these songs, we wanted an extra sense of propulsion, so we’d sometimes take out a whole verse to push it along.”
Since Clinic’s 2000-released debut album, “Internal Wrangler”, the band have always bucked trends and done their own weird little thing. “We’ve always run in the opposite direction to what’s happening,” says Blackburn. “So if anything gets too close to sounding like something else, then we’ll take a different route.”
He adds: “We’ve always had this absolute faith in what we do. It’s relatively outsider-ish music, but that’s something that’s motivated us to keep going, because it’s good to have things that are a little out on the fringes. There’s just not enough of that kind of music these days.”
Clinic – “Wild In The Streets” is out now on Domino Record Co.
