For the most part, on-stage surprises are welcomed and appreciated by fans. Cookie-cutter shows are easily forgotten, so it's always nice to see a band pull something unexpected out of their hat, even if it is their arrival to the stage in dinosaur costumes. Because generally, a band with enough guts to show up looking like velociraptors will be wise enough to shed the costume early on and get down to the bear bones of their music. Despite how much Lady Gaga might think otherwise, the fans are really there for the music and not for the sideshow that goes along with it.
That's why I was disappointed to see Clinic walk out for their Doug Fir set on Wednesday night wearing African shirts, doo-rags, and surgical face masks. I had no problem with the first of their attire, but those damn masks bothered me throughout the entire show. At first I thought it was funny and remembered seeing a photo of the band in which they had worn the same facial gear. It seemed an appropriate shtick, but after listening to about three tunes in which the vocals had been muffled by the presence of said masks, I was overly annoyed these Liverpudlians had chosen to wreck their sound with the use of such unnecessary props.
For their albums, Clinic produce tight psych-punk music that upholds my faith in bands reinventing sounds of yesterday into sounds of today. It's delightfully gloomy stuff, and it's flush with glamorous interruptions of psychedelia. Lead singer Ade Blackburn supports all of this with his corrosively beautiful vocals, and guitarist Jonathan Hartley keeps people on their toes with his abrasive riffs. I never get tired of listening to these guys, and they never let things get boring, but again: I could never get used to those masks. Blackburn has said the group wears them as an homage to the bands Crime and the Residents, to add a "visual side" to what they were doing, but I only see it as a distraction from what they really are: a dynamic European foursome that play wonderfully unique music.
Unique could easily describe their openers this night, too - first on the bill was Portland's Wax Fingers, who create a brashly melodic and slightly schizophrenic (in the right ways) brand of music. Backup singers popped onto the stage here and there, and their contribution was mostly that of guttural vocals, hand claps, and bell shaking. This nicely backed lead singer Pete Bosack's use of a vocal distortion device that sometimes placed him in 1983, then in other times, 2065. It's music creation like this that truly makes these guys hard to define. They've got a really spacious sound, and it boasts tons of unorthodox pieces to it, so you're often left wondering what you just heard. Their new, self-titled debut demands repeated listens.
The Fresh & Onlys showed what happens when surf pop meets whiskey, then heroin, then recovers to sing longingly about the good ole days. They proved themselves as the best of the night, playing a harmonic type of garage rock that was punctuated perfectly by the fiery rips from guitarist Wymond Miles. Most of their songs felt like clean, yet raucous affairs, and the surf theme held itself up in a dark and twisted and fantastical kind of way. More than once, the face of "Point Break"'s Patrick Swayze flashed in my mind, as the band hammered out their enchanting grooves.
Songs like "Red Light Green Light" are as delightfully dizzying as their lyrics and match up to the desert rock sounds of early Queens of the Stone Age. It's fabulous to hear self-proclaimed love songs with lyrics such as, "I'm a thief - I take anything I want." This band is as audacious as their music is, and it really seems they could grab rock 'n' roll by the balls if they wanted to.
But back to Clinic. I still have big love for this hallucinogenic foursome, masks or no masks. With their most recent album, Bubblegum, their music is being taken to less exploratory depths than ever before, but I maintain hope they'll continue to brandish their smolderingly punk attitude toward whatever they create in the near future. In the meantime, lose the masks, gentlemen. I'm actually angry at how much I had to talk about those stupid things instead of focusing on the excellent sounds you guys produce.
