I Love It When You Blink Your Eyes | |
| For those of you (un)fortunate to be dwellers of the UK, can I just take a moment to wallow in the splendour that is the current fuel 'crisis'? How many of you have noticed the marked rise in the quality of life in your town/city these past few days? Roads nearly bereft of cars, the air feeling tangibly cleaner and listenÉ you can hear the city breathe. And if not, you can actually hear the birds that are still hanging around in the September warmth. It's just such a shame it's not going to last, and no matter how many people have stopped and thought just how NICE it actually is without all those cars clogging up the place, you just know that before you can even blink, we'll be back to the horrors of the queued vehicles spewing shit into the sky, not to mention our lungs. But it's been lovely while it lasted. Speaking of lovely while it lasts, has anyone else sat in front of their TV recently and felt happy to hear Clinic? I must admit I was a bit stunned at first when I flicked the channel and heard the strains of 'The Second Line' coming from MTV. I thought 'oh I didn't know they made a video for this' and turned my head to look, only to be assaulted by a Levi's logo. Personally I have no problems with bands getting their tracks onto adverts, mainly because I think that the boundaries between Art, Politics, politics and Commercialism have blurred to the point of being indistinguishable, of being so utterly fluid as to be irrelevant. Which, you could argue, has been the whole aim of the multinationals all along; to stop us thinking for ourselves and to just Buy The Brand. But I wont buy Levis because of Clinic, and I wont buy Clinic because of Levis. I have my own mind, you know. I didn't know that Clinic had a single out. Actually I have no idea when the Clinic single was out and I might be months out of date. I don't care, of course. I only saw it in passing in the last week of August and of course I picked it up right away. It is sleeved in white with a typeface that looks like it's been blown up on a crappy old photocopier, so the letters start to bleed together. There are no upper case letters, which I always like, and there's a sticker with exactly the same details as the sleeve itself, which is very funny, if you are sad enough to find these things amusing, which naturally I do. The single is called 'Distortions', the title track being the stand out track on the Internal Wrangler album and is as fine a gem as Clinic have produced, which you all ought to realise is saying a lot. 'Kimberley' (from the Clinic CD) remains simply one of the songs that can make me break down and cry, and 'Distortions' is in the same vein. Downbeat, sparse and with that all essential space to disappear into, 'Distortions' weaves and waves, burrows into your psyche and borrows your heartbeat for the first three minutes and forty one seconds of forever. Clinic, as the best things are apt to do, make no sense whatsoever. I know nothing about them and remain unsure as to whether anyone else except their mothers and lovers know any more, and even then I'd be unwilling to accept their tales as gospel. Because, in spite or regardless of this, Clinic retain a peculiar aura, make records that conform to the blueprints according to Clinic and are thus delicious treats in a somewhat barren landscape of contemporary 'mainstream-independent' music in the UK at the moment. Cherishable and perishable oddball psychedelia for the 21st Century. © Alistair Fitchett 2000 |