Pinball Wizards On The Loose

Clinic “Model Citizen”

Clinic have essentially sounded exactly the same for nearly 30 years, but they’ve also never made the same record twice. As I’ve noted many times before, they work within a very specific and highly recognizable style – the buzzing vintage organs, the dubby melodica, the jaunty rhythms, Ade Blackburn’s distinctive nasal vocal tone – but they’re always tossing different musical references into their familiar stew. Or, in the case of their 10th record Wild in the Streets, a different attitude. Now a duo, Blackburn and Jonathan Hartley seem more batty and eccentric than ever. Whatever crankiness and willful perversity has always existed in their music seems to have only intensified with age. Blackburn sounds extra peevish when he declares “obscene, what you believe…obscene” in the chorus of “Model Citizen,” but he undermines his venom with unexpected audio slapstick. Out of nowhere, his voice goes Daffy Duck mode for a few seconds. And later on, a sudden cartoonish BLEEP censoring some implied profanity. But was there even something to bleep out in the first place?

Buy it from Bandcamp.