Could Clinic be Britain’s most bloody-minded band? Let’s look at the facts: they wear surgical masks; they hail from Liverpool but take the piss out of The Beatles; their influences seem to include the Velvets, The Monks and maybe even some old fairground organists; they don’t even use real words when they sing, for God’s sake. Yet it all gels together magnificently.
Funf is a sort of grab-bag of the band’s scarcer tracks that nevertheless won’t, it has to be said, set the collecting world alight. But no matter, because these all-too brief 12 slices (some barely stretch past 60 seconds) display Clinic’s microcosmic world as well as any of their albums. Sure, there’s nothing here as grand as the The Return Of Evil Bill single, but opener The Majestic wrong-foots the listener, being funereal in it’s pace (and menace). The confusinglymonikered J.O./Love Is Just A Tool, too, is wonderfully sedate.
Elsewhere, on hamonica/ melodica/feedback-tinged stomps such as Nicht (surely a template for the far inferior Brakes?) and Magic Boots, where the punk side bursts out, proceedings are far less exciting. Strange, that these almost make Clinic’s studied, crafted singularity seem formulaic.
