In the 1960s our parents listened to The Beatles and their
parents could not understand how the music was deemed
listenable.
Strangely, it was easy to feel like one of those stodgy
middle-aged parents circa 1965 at Clinic’s performance at the
Palace on Friday night.
It could be that Clinic, the members of which, like the Fab
Four, hail from Liverpool, creates true art that is too deep for
the average rock ‘n’ roll fan to comprehend. But its
sterile, potentially entertaining, surgical motif is obscured by
the simple fact that the music proves to be more of a burden for
the listener than a pleasure.
The four members of Clinic, Ade Blackburn, Brian Campbell,
Hartley and Carl Turney, perform in matching surgical scrubs and
masks and make music that could be the soundtrack to a bad dream.
Whether this aural assault is enjoyable is a matter of personal
opinion. Guitars chomp, the bass plods along heavily, and the
keyboard wheezes endlessly. These elements were used relentlessly
throughout the show with mixed results.
The band’s closest thing to a hit, the chugging “The
Second Line,” received the loudest cheers of the night and
“Pet Eunuch,” with its machine gun guitar, was
Clinic’s stirring version of punk rock.
In front of a packed house of artists and bearded men, the band
performed on a bare stage but utilized one interesting lighting
prop ““ projected on a screen behind the band was a real time
display of the sound wave the band was making, in line with the
surgical theme.
Clinic faithfully reproduced many songs off of its 2002 release
“Walking with Thee,” and culled some from its 2001
debut “Internal Wrangler.” The music was as cold as it
sounded on record. This was largely due to singer Ade
Blackburn’s nasal and incomprehensible vocals, the monotonous
guitar parts, and the band’s non-existent stage presence.
The lazy guitar line on “Mr. Moonlight” gave the
song an ethereal quality and the rave-up “Walking with
Thee” clawed and growled as Blackburn yelped over the
breaks.
Either Clinic takes itself too seriously or I’m clueless;
however, it can be said that rock and roll was never so
inaccessible and devoid of warmth. There was another band from
Liverpool that went about rock ‘n’ roll a bit
differently and still managed to make something relevant.