After exploding into life nine years ago, making an impact with DIY single, ‘IPC Sub Editors Dictate Our Youth’ the esoteric and prickly Liverpool four-piece, ‘Clinic’ build on the gothic malevolence and screaming, spooky voodoo of their Domino debut, ‘Internal Wrangler’ (2000) and albums like ‘Circle of Fifths’ (2004) with a similarly creepy and intimidating web of experimental spine-tinglers that includes the hall-of-mirror harmonies of ‘Animal/Human’, the charming, teeth-clenched grotesque of ‘Sunshine Superman’ doppelganger ‘Gideon’ and the Wicker Man horror of ‘Harvest’.
Described as ‘party-record’ by comparison to previous albums, ‘Visitations’ is, for all its peculiarities a more accessible record; primitive, direct, surreal and given the band’s credit history, surprisingly generous. It still sounds sub-human, of course, and it still limps gravely from the crypt of sixties psychedelic and gothic underground, but for its obvious indebtedness to Nico, Lou and the gang and to the ferocious ballroom of Beefheart, Can, Sonic Youth and Suicide, ‘Visitations’ sees Clinic build convincingly on the loose, eclectic promise of earlier projects to deliver a record of solid, absorbing psychodrama.