Saturday 12th September

'Friends Reunited'
Special Double Headline Show

CLINIC + SHEARWATER

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CLINIC:
(DOMINO RECORDS)

Clinic are from Liverpool, but that's where the similarity with any other quartet ends. In fact, Clinic sound like The Beatles never happened, as if pop remained in a permanent thrall to Joe Meek before jumping straight to Studio One dub. Or as if the Sangri-Las drifted into Crime.
Web - http://www.clinicvoot.org
Myspace - http://www.myspace.com/clinicvoot

SHEARWATER
(MATADOR)

"One of the year's best rock albums" - New York Times

"This is a chilling release, epic in both reach and accmplishment... one of the finest records to be released in recent memory." - PopMatters

Hailed as "almost impossibly majestic and beautiful" (NPR), Shearwater's Palo Santo (2007, Matador), a suite of ethereal but oddly disquieting art-rock songs loosely centered around the life and death of singer Christa Paffgen (aka Nico), marked the Texan quartet's debut on the national stage. The New York Times named the album one of the year's very best, and the band's singular combination of sonic abandon and restraint, spun around the soaring, otherworldly voice of part-time ornithologist Jonathan Meiburg - drew comparisons to late-period Talk Talk and both the lovely and anxious moments of Eno's early solo work.This year's much-anticipated Rook takes the band into realms both richer and stranger. Though a similarly haunted, elegaic mood - punctuated by flashes of dread and menace - pervades the album, Rook is its own animal, at once more accessible (the near-title track, "Rooks", anchored by Thor Harris' thunderous kick drum, a booming organ, and a stately trumpet line, could almost be mistaken for radio-friendly) and more accomplished than its predecessor, with a depth and grandeur that seem improbably packed into the album's tidy 35 minutes. Squalls of feedback have largely given way to sudden gusts of strings and woodwinds, though the band's fondness for unusual instrumentation remains intact - harp, hammer dulcimer, and a curiously carved metal box all take featured roles. Each song is a mini-epic, from the in-medias-res opening of "On the Death of the Waters" to the pounding (but drumless) urgency of "Leviathan, Bound", the abrupt rock of "Century Eyes", the crystalline depths and heights of "I Was a Cloud" and "The Snow Leopard", and the final, elegant flourish of "The Hunter's Star". Rook is unlike any other album you'll hear this year. It has the clarity and yearning ineffability of a waking dream, the strange beauty and internal logic of a fairy tale, and above all, evokes a vanishing world that may or may not be our own.

Web - http://www.shearwatermusic.com
Myspace - http://www.myspace.com/shearwater

Brudenell Social Club, Leeds

Tickets £10 adv.
Available now from....
JUMBO RECORDS - 0113 2455570 - http://www.jumborecords.co.uk/tickets.asp?sort=&event_id=8605
CRASH RECORDS - 0113 2436743 - http://crashrecords.co.uk/online/product.php?xProd=7669&xSec=25
SEETICKETS - http://www.seetickets.com/S.Asp?A=Clinic+%2B+Shearwater&P=5938
WEGOTTICKETS - http://www.wegottickets.com/event/54266

plus local support tba.
whoooop!