Clinic
Clinic
[Domino UK]
Rating: 8.0
If you've never pondered the source of the rat-at-tat-tat boom-boom ascending
from darkened alleyways, know that these sounds emanate not from gunfire, but
from an unregistered Liverpudlian Clinic whose surgeons engage in dissections
of the by-gone underground influences of America. The execution is primitive,
but its intent is logical. The music is elemental, having evolved from the
ancestral types that serve as influences to their rough methodology. But a
balanced rationale clearly governs Clinic's menacing aural approach. The song
title "I.P.C. Subeditors Dictate Our Youth" signifies a blatant call to action
against the modern-day bureaucratic mind-control that pervades youth markets
both above and below ground. It indicates a deviant sense of purpose that more
scrupulous medical practitioners lack.
The surgeon's table has seen the inhumanly savage cut-and-paste of White
Light/White Heat-era Velvet Underground with the rhythmic assault of Hal
Blaine under Phil Spector's direction. The screams are Spector's own-- the
sonic equivalent of studied horror from witnessing organs being spilled upon
the sterile tile floor.
The technique is concerned with brutal distortions of aesthetics. "Porno"
aches and moans orgasmically to a warbled throbbing of keyboard and guitar.
It's topped with indecipherable vocal incantations meant to terrorize those
that have trouble grasping the deconstruction of rhythm within the context
of terrible sex.
An insidious affinity for indirect discourse is discernible in the otherwise
unintelligible vocal approach. "D.P." and "D.T." are violent odes to sonic
aggression, exemplified by the less sophisticated punk rockers of the '60s
and '70s. "Punk," having become a loaded political term, is applied here in
the same way an anesthetic is administered for inducing numbness in wounded
patients.
The knives-out approach of these medical knaves belies the sadistic glee with
which they patch their subjects together. The gruesome freshness of their
product indicates a fruitful decomposition of influences from within-- the
appropriation of life-blood from yesterday's walking dead imbues their macabre
creations with mortal verisimilitude and stylistic panache. Shrouded in a
skeletal grasp of melody, the most shocking prospect is the widespread acceptance
of their unsound practices, and the slow unfolding of their message through the
easily misconstrued language of rhythm and dissonance. Subversion has never
sounded so palpably suicidal.
-S. Murray