Clinic!
Do It! (Domino Recording Co)

Do It! is a summer album, a warped technicolor celebration -- pop music and severe cut-ups going from melody to acid psychosis to acoustic, usually in the same song. Recorded by Clinic in their Liverpool studio and mixed by Jacquire King (Tom Waits, Kings of Leon, Archie Bronson Outfit), Do It! is a skewed pop amalgam of Motown, Exuma, deep lounge and The Balloon Farm (amongst many).

Clinic’s magisterial fifth album opens with what sounds like the melodious chimes of a harpsichord before all hell breaks loose. Asking you if you want the good or the bad news, the song lurches between Ade Blackburn’s bittersweet vocal line concerning memory and the band tearing itself inside out. Do It! is a record dripping in a delicious and seductive tension. Clinic have never sounded so relaxed and so uptight.

On “Free Not Free” you’d be forgiven for thinking you were listening to a lost Isley Brothers acetate; until a guitar intervenes and the sense of reverie mutates, as it so often does, into caustic comedown. Clinic have long inhabited their own universe. The world of Do It! feels expanded and exploded! A fortune teller horse rides through “High Coin” accompanied by the moment “your thoughts begin to fray” and the band play on, locked in luminous syncopation.

“Mary and Eddie” features a classic Clinic melody line, eerie and intense for a turn around the psychic dancehall. But however spooked and hallucinatory the imagery, Do It! is equally exuberant, giddy and up. The album closes with the sound of church bells, the rhythmic sway of a drunken waltz and a guitar trying to mace someone - leaving you feeling peaceful, confused and pretty stunned.

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