Bubblegum

It's nice to have some consistency in the world, and if Clinic doesn't rewrite their songbook with each album, that's all right. Bubblegum will lull away your complaints.

It's definitely a change from Clinic's brash art-punk and wicked folk, but it's one the band had to make to keep their music vital. Fortunately, Bubblegum's sound is so inviting that it sticks.

Bubblegum is unlikely to see Clinic rocket to mainstream notoriety all of a sudden, but they'll continue to be one of indie's best known secrets.

Bubblegum is Clinic at their most approachable and, importantly, shows them to be sharp and direct in their more affecting statements.

The surgical-mask costumes help in that regard: coupled with their herky-jerky brain-scan riffs and malevolent aura, Clinic look more likely to perform torture surgery on your ass in some water-logged basement than give a concert.

Clinic sounds far from the garage and closer to the amphitheater. In places, the album seems nearer to the cinematic swoon of Tindersticks than the usual curt jangle.

Look, this isn't a Clinic record that's gonna convert anyone not already checked-in, but it is another encouraging move, proving that the band is not content to stagnate in the confines of its sound.

The title of Clinic's sixth album cheekily nods to the surgical-masked Brits' current, revamped sound--a softer spin on indie pop with their usual gritty agitation almost completely scrubbed away.

Overall, Bubblegum, is very much a triumph of restyling, that makes it perhaps the most necessary Clinic LP since 2000's Internal Wrangler debut. Perhaps however, it's also time that Clinic developed more as a songwriting vehicle, with singer Ade Blackburn making his vocal/lyrical presence more memorably penetrating.

If you've embraced Clinic's reverberating panache for the past ten years, there's no reason to dislike Bubblegum's peculiar fabric. This is the sound of a unit that still has no intention in keeping up with the times, delivering more of what they do best with an already proven track record.

Nevertheless, as much as Bubblegum evidences a lot of thought and effort on the part of the band, it still has the sound of musicians going through the motions and sticking too close to their formulae.

It's far from bad, but if you're still waiting for a Clinic record as great as the utterly seminal Internal Wrangler, keep waiting, and probably don't hold your breath.

Bubblegum may be the sound of growth, but its progress is directed in a strangely traditional direction for a band formerly disinterested in such ordinariness.

So aesthetically perfect was the formula that Clinic displayed on their earliest singles, an acidic blend of The Velvet Underground, '60s garage and The Monks delivered with frenetic intensity, that subsequent attempts to branch out have felt strangely limited. Bubblegum, however, succeeds quite neatly in making some distance. [Nov 2010, p.83]

If someone hired Clinic to play a prom, Bubblegum would be the result. [Fall 2010, p. 58]