Clinic
Internal Wrangler LP

You’ve all heard of Clinic. They’re the ones that took their name to heart and decided it would be a good idea to impersonate certain members of the medical profession. It could be worse, they could have called themselves French Maids.

Blink and you’ll miss Internal Wrangler, your mind wanders for a moment on track one and the next time you concentrate you’ve reached track ten. In fact if your mind wanders on track one you could come back to find the same track, but a different song.

Voodoo Wop is the sound of a band sticking pins into effigies of IPC sub-editors whilst prancing demonically around the Amazonian jungle. They then stop and go to the seaside, or so the waves splashing in the background would lead you to believe. This is quite indicative of Clinic’s sound, they go off in a rush and then surprise you be changing tempo, changing mood, changing melody somewhere in a song.

Fifties jive and New Orleans Jazz beats get introduced to Clinic’s surgery, whereby they are prescribed some amphetamines, and leave with the mutterings of Ade Blackburn in their ears.

They may be hailed as the saviours of pop, but Clinic seem more likely to want to slice your throat with an NHS scalpel than turn up for a stint at Tops Of the Pops.

Even the lullaby Goodnight Georgie has sinister undertones.

There are no self indulgent jams on this album either, as you often get with “experimental” albums. The tension is kept high, and instead of drawing out songs Clinic went the other way, they compressed them. C.Q. feels like a squished concertina…heck the album feels like a squished concertina.

Ade Backburn mutters, mumbles, howls, jabbers, coos, sneers and whispers through an album that resembles the tube, all stops and starts and claustrophobia whilst being in a rush. Unlike the tube in the rush hour, it’s strangely quite enjoyable.