"This record is a celebration of the 600th anniversary of The Bristol Charter. A celebration of sheer joy, lapping at your froth. The dog at your hearth. The past to your present." Then - as the carnival organ retires and the filtered harps break it down with long, swinging notes whistling back and forth - the sleepy voice fades to be replaced by the psychedelic guitar jam from every speaker. And then, left channel only, the wedding bells with slightly off-time clanging ring in. That peculiar mash of sound is not how Clinic’s Do It! starts, but how it ends.
It's a hard job to review Clinic's relaxed, colourful eccentricities purely because they have a sound that doesn't compare to any other band. This was once proclaimed by their website, calling them the band "that sounds like no other band". But that's not them being up themselves, it's just bluntly realistic. What Clinic do sound a lot like, though, is Clinic. Fans of their earlier work will attest that the fuzzy, psychedelic Clinic sound of today doesn’t deviate from the feel of 2000's Internal Wrangler and anything in the discography thereafter. But it’s a unique sound that has no reason to change and, even with the familiarity, Do It! also comes with freshness. The opening of Tomorrow utilises guitar strings plucked with clumsy heavy-handedness yet still manages to create melody. And Clinic are the only band I've ever heard that can play a harp like an electric guitar, somehow smuggling in chunky, stunted riffs on those strings to those who’ll listen carefully enough.
Clinic may have not expanded much beyond their weird, experimental waltzes of the last decade on Do It!, but given that every album they release receives critical acclaim, they deserve respect for delivering once again. The only reason to ignore Clinic is to avoid getting infected.
Brad McNaughton