April 13, 1999

Clinic

New York, mid-'70s, the gang's all here. Behind massive aviator shades, too poor for drugs, too cool for school, [B]Alan Vega[/B] and [B]Martin Rev[/B] of [a]Suicide[/a]....

8 / 10 New York, mid-'70s, the gang's all here. Behind massive aviator shades, too poor for drugs, too cool for school, Alan Vega and Martin Rev of Suicide. Lou Reed's probably looked better, now that he's shaved off all his hair, and he's probably sounded better too, now that he's started going on about the Nazis all the time, but hey. And then there's Ade Blackburn, Carl Turney, Brian Campbell and Heartley. Nice guys, good masks, called Clinic.

Eh? Clinic?

That's right. Oh, you might have heard some old nonsense about how they arrived from Merseyside two years ago, and once made a scarce creative living as Pure Morning. How they sprang to the attention of John Peel with a song called 'IPC Subeditors Dictate Our Youth' that soundtracked the Gotham-like shadow cast by King's Reach Tower. But really that's all just disinformation. Really, they live in New York 25 years ago, and that's something you'll just have to deal with.

/img/Clinik599.jpg Domino have helped out with this nine-track compilation of their low-key first three singles, originally put out on their own Aladdins Cave Of Golf label. You can now see how they captured the seamy beat of their local streets, the primitive keyboard drones of some of their weirder contemporaries, and the fractured mumbles of the confused at night. Obsessed with drums in both the figurative sense (they're on all the covers) and the purely percussive (the signature Clinic sound is the reverberating bass drum alarm that announces the arrival of 'Monkey On Your Back' and 'Cement Mixer'), for Clinic the rhythm is the message, because it makes more sense than the words.

A nasty sense of humour that you'd almost describe as 'English' (if you didn't know better, that is) is working in these songs. One, called 'Porno', is basically orgasmic screeching, while another, 'Kimberley', is an eerie tale of night-time visitation. It is, of course, played on a melodica, and adds a rickety, penniless dub tinge to proceedings. Clinic wear masks, by the way. Like surgeons, possibly. But maybe just for kicks.

'Clinic' is merely a stopgap to make available their penurious early work while they move from the Lower East Side to the luxuriant Park Avenue surroundings of their debut album proper. In the meantime, an IPC Section Editor dictates this mark.