Clinic
Visitations

By Chris Pacifico

If there’s one UK band whose audible dynamic approach is untouched compared to that of its native contemporaries or just about any other band in the galaxy, it’s Liverpool’s own Clinic. While some thought it would be difficult to top its 2002 masterpiece Walking With Thee, Clinic has raised eyebrows once more with its fourth release Visitations, which was recorded at its own recently completed studio. And while it’s experimental, it still retains the band’s penchant for dark pop and has a post-punk thrust. That’s brought out by the paranoid tension in Ade Blackburn’s vocals; something producer Gareth Jones (Depeche Mode, Interpol) is good at capturing.

Visitations takes off with the wildly trippy blues guitar-led barnburner “Family” and the fizzling reverb-meets-autoharp madness in “Gideon.” The album’s first single “Harvest (Within You)” hastily meanders with a celestial groove and a gong. Visitations is forthrightly pounding, raw and abrasive yet furtively soothing and druggy like the love child of Syd Barrett and the Stooges. It usually takes a couple of months before the year’s best albums emerge, but Visitations is a rather early surprise and something the band has clearly waited its whole career to make.