Do It!

Editors’ Notes Clinic may be the only psychedelic freak-out band on the planet that perform wearing surgical masks and Hawaiian shirts, but they don’t rely on gimmicks or trendy tricks to make their interesting music. They do it the old fashioned way: with varied musical textures, an affection for layering, distortion and repetitive grooves, mind-bending imagery, and really glorious guitar sounds. Do It!, the Liverpool band’s fifth album, isn’t much of a departure from albums past, but that may be the point. A few tracks like “Mary and Eddie” start out as one thing and end as another, but the steady, high voltage charge of tracks like “Memories,” “The Witch,” and “Winged Wheel” carry the collection, carving bottomless grooves with layers of reverberating, acidic guitar, insistent, ominous floor toms, and bass drums beating as if on a war path. Singer Ade Blackburn sounds like a desperate, netherworld voice looking for the light; haunted tones of vintage keyboards and pianos, whispered vocal parts mixed in like an instrumental track, and occasional bongos and jingling bells create a colorful soundscape for a mind trip. The full-on garage punk assault of “Shopping Bag,” and the sinister overtones of “Corpus Christie” and “High Coin” are superb Clinic creations.