Clinic: Walking With Thee : Music Reviews : Rolling Stone

Album Reviews

Don't let song titles such as "Sunlight Bathes Our Home" and "Welcome" fool you. On Clinic's second album, Walking With Thee, sunlight appears about as frequently as it does on a dismal winter afternoon in Clinic's home city of Liverpool. Singer Ade Blackburn beckons, "Come fill yourself with dreams," on the opening "Harmony," but the vaguely unsettling mood has already been set: mournful Ennio Morricone melodica, keyboards that breathe with the asthmatic insistence of Laurie Anderson's "O Superman," and pensive electric piano. Fortunately, Clinic do more with these badly lit vibes than merely curl up and wallow in them. Instead, they squeeze cold-sweat, clenched-teeth tension into their cryptic rock, evoking all at once the dapper menace of Tindersticks, the deadpan decadence of the Velvet Underground and the thrift-shop psychedelia of the Beta Band.

No matter how spooky they are, the grooves bite, from the modified calypso of "The Equaliser" to the hurtling "Pet Eunoch," in which a Doberman guitar snaps at its leash while a pianist pounds nails. Carl Turney's sharp cymbal work sizzles in the foreground, like a rattlesnake suddenly looming out of the bushes, while Blackburn's voice hovers in the shadows; guitars and keyboards drift like heavy storm clouds. "Disintegrate!" Blackburn hisses through a momentary gap in "Welcome." The oppressive organ drone of the title song leaves him gasping, and as "The Vulture" circles, the singer breaks into a feverish mantra. The closing lullaby of lyrical guitar and lilting background voices promises a respite. But then Blackburn purrs, "You're all made up for the wars," and you realize the track, like much of Walking With Thee, is all the more disquieting for its prettiness.

GREG KOT
(RS 891 - March 14, 2002)