Clinic: If Only They Would Revolt With Thee
By Nathan Fisher
A&F Writer

I've been listening to the Liverpool quartet Clinic since the spring was young and love was everywhere. The venerable Nick Smith '03 had referred to their new album, Walking with Thee, as "the best of 2002 so far" in this very newspaper (he has recently retracted that particular claim, preferring now to say "Clinic's pretty much over with") and over the break a few weeks later I found myself in frigid Vancouver, BC, at the local, post-national Virgin Megastore, desperate to reattach myself to what the (Canadian) kids were into. There, I finally broke down and purchased the new album, then available from the good folks at Domino for a mere $16.95. After just three listens, I fell in love with the quirky, organ-driven post-punk/art-rock haunted carnival sound contained therein and rocked that bitch down the coast Kid Rock-style, except that he rocks yachts down coasts instead of albums.

After that, I began to pick up every Clinic release I could get my hands on. I began listening to them exclusively for a good portion of the summer, my favorite July use of free time being to lie in bed and listen to the lyrics "I've pictured you in coffins/my baby in a coffin" from the song "Distortions" over and over and make myself sad about war. After the sun sets in July, sometimes you just want to be sad about war. Clinic can help with that.

They have also tapped the punk ethos of blind rage toward, you know, the system, except that their fury is less blind and more methodical, one of the ways they get branded with the "post-" prefix by our prefix-happy music press, myself admittedly included. Methodical thrashing is quite post- at a time when post- is definitely in among the hip journalists and the with-it lovers, let me tell you. So, are these guys the real thing politically, or are they riding the latest trend, just trying to make love to the "Big Music" ideological state apparatus, as it were? I had to see them live to reach a conclusion, which, as it happens, is inconclusive at best, owing mostly to my less than solid grasp of Althusser.

To their credit, Clinic's first single was self-released and called "I.P.C. Subeditors Dictate Our Youth," and the occasional intelligible lyric that manages to surface is often along the lines of "your revolution was a joke," from "2nd Foot Stomp." They have Radiohead-style paranoia and, as mentioned before, they certainly have controlled fury, which occasionally involves the clarinet. This convinced me that they shared my views on culture and politics. But then, they got signed by Universal Records and "The Second Line" became the backdrop for a Levi's advert, so their political status became a little questionable.

Slightly skeptical, I still shelled out $16 to see them, along with the Apples in Stereo, at the seedy, seedy Hollywood Palace last Friday night. Many in the crowd were wearing surgical masks and many of the young women were dressed in nurses' uniforms. This was slightly disconcerting, especially since I had yet to make the crucial connection between Clinic the band and the medico-juridical concept of "the clinic" as in Birth of the Clinic by the wily Michel Foucault.