Enough For Your New Life

Clinic “Animal Human” – Though they are still generally lacking the manic spark that made their first three records some of the most compelling art-punk of the past twenty years, Clinic sound far more focused and inspired on their forthcoming LP Visitations. Of course, this is all relative to their previous record, Winchester Cathedral, the only dud in their discography, though not actually a bad album so much as a document of a band in an awkward creative holding pattern. They are still cannibalizing their own back catalog on the new album (the opening track’s vocal melody is extremely similar to that of “Welcome” from Walking With Thee, for example), but Visitations has a tone that is both subtly and obviously different from their previous work.

When Winchester Cathedral was released, I suggested that their approach to music was to deliberately treat elements of their style as a limited set of modular variables that can be taken apart and recombined with new textures, and I’m even more confident about that theory now. It’s not tremendously different from Jack White’s approach to his songwriting and visual presentation in The White Stripes, though Clinic’s taste and execution is far more obscure and abstract. One of the most exciting things about Clinic for me has been in the way Ade Blackburn often sings without enunciating recognizable words, and sometimes alternates between phonetic mutterings, adenoidal yelps and cryptic lyrics containing ambiguous references to religion and spirituality.

There are more lyrics than ever on Visitations, but that doesn’t make the record any easier to understand. In fact, somehow the record feels even more dense and oblique, and I’m uncomfortable making too many observations about its content just yet, as I feel that it is only just now beginning to reveal itself to me after getting through it about eight times as of this writing. I am especially impressed by “Animal Human,” a track that starts off as an eerie prayer, and ends with a scratchy funk guitar groove that is unlike anything the group has ever written before while also sounding like no one else but Clinic. (Click here for Domino Records’ Visitations site.)

Robert Pollard “Serious Bird Woman (You Turn Me On)” – Bob Pollard simply would not be Bob Pollard if he wasn’t doing everything he could to sabotage his own pop songs, and that is just something you have to decide to either dislike (along with most of the rest of the world), or embrace, if you’re willing to find charm in his quirks and often questionable creative decisions. “Serious Bird Woman” is essentially a catchy power ballad with largely straightforward lyrics for a love song, albeit one addressed to an, um, Serious Bird Woman. Pollard has written so many tunes with sincerely heartfelt lyrics existing side by side with odd jokes and bizarre imagery that the Bird Woman thing is almost a non-issue, but his choice to sing the song as…weirdly…as he does on the album recording is just puzzling to me, especially since he’s capable of singing it so much better live. Is this deliberate, or is it just evidence of carelessness? It’s hard to tell, especially when I’m starting to think that the awkward singing on the studio recording actually works. (Click here to pre-order it via Pollard’s official site.)

Elsewhere: My review of The Quiet is up on The Movie Binge.