Clinic - Walking With Thee

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Before their stunted growth in the mid-2000s, Clinic was one of those bands that actually mastered their strange assortment of influences, rather than being ruled by them. They established a sound that was effortlessly irreverent, a kind of controlled schizophrenia spelled out by distorted clarinet, pulsating organ and, save for a few exceptions, trim drum patterns. Instead of assuming the presumptuous mantle of mixed media party host, the band traversed fog-addled forests of the subconscious to carve out a niche - regardless of the historical or contextual fallout.

Walking With Thee highlights the band's ability to create darkness as viewed through a lens of cryptic abstraction. The album comes off much like those 3D holographic cards that you tilt to see the image change, the only difference is that in place of the rainbow refraction is a monochromatic white to gray to black, all stabbed through by windows of pale teal translucence. Where as their debut album, Internal Wrangler, was a swatch - turning from glib folk tale, to bittersweet eulogy, to cheeky social commentary - Walking With Thee presents a distinctly bizarre winter.

Aside from the opening track, "Harmony", the album is chalked full of revolving-door lyrics that make pinning down a respectable interpretation difficult. On "Harmony", singer Ade Blackburn proclaims in his high-register croon, "I believe in Christmas eve/I believe to trust one's free/I believe in happiness/no one living with regrets/come fill yourself with dreams", which is a clear, albeit, resigned call for the goodness in all people. While the lyrics in the song are uncharacteristic of the rest of the album, "Harmony" comes off as a sort of shining gate, standing before the specter-flown landscapes of the rest of the album. It's not that the song is stylistically different - the clarinet, punctuating keyboard and simple house drum rhythm are right in line with the rest of Walking With Thee - but it's optimistic lyrics push it into a reverse-Pixies scenario, where the words are kind and the music is ominous.

The album's most successful hit, "Walking With Thee", is an organ-grinder with clashing drums and Blackburn's paranoid librarian delivery. "As you climb up the stairs and come back forever/Summer's in the house, untamed it was" warbles the singer, following it up with a repetition of "walking with thee" in the chorus. Fuck knows what Blackburn is referring to, but the imagery in the lyrics and the rough delivery of the music provides a creeping, jerky stop-motion animation for the mind, something involving inanimate objects coming to life. Which is convenient, because the music video for the song chooses exactly such a visual representation. When the singer cries out repeatedly, "no, no, no, no", any semblance of knowing what the song might actually be about goes completely out the window.

The nocturnal sway of songs like "Mr. Moonlight" "The Vulture" and "For the Wars" prompt you to travel to otherworldly beat cafes - far, far away from Earth. Everyone snapping their fingers and rolling their shoulders in hypnotized unison, not knowing if they are waiting for an ending or a beginning. Murals of spattered blocks, undefined triangles, cubed self-portraits, still-life lamps and fruit turned into precocious beasts and random phrases litter the sparse walls. It's a place in your mind you can't quite find, but also a place that is undeniably there.

Walking With Thee also pulls upon the sparse, acid guitar lines of spaghetti western soundtracks, mashing them into the ramshackle repetition of krautrock. "Welcome", "The Bridge" and "Sunlight Bathes Our Home" all feature jittering drum lines that have distorted, lightly reverbed guitar ribbons strewn across the top. Add in the permeating ghost of the clarinet, and the idiosyncratic haunt comes on quite strong. The songs act as a textured counterpoint to the pensive night meditation of the album's other half.

After writing all of this about the album, I've come to realize that there is a disjointedness to Walking With Thee that is definitely noticeable, but altogether unimportant in the record's enjoyment. It's because there is a roundabout cohesion, like a collage of unrelated pictures and trinkets that just -works- when you see it. Even "Pet Eunuch", which stands alone as a blast of needling punk rock, somehow fits amidst the minimal genre film soundtracks and dark jazz fusion. Walking With Thee is much like a stream-of-consciousness writing exercise, basking in the unassociated associations that arise out of letting the mind loose. With Clinic, their minds found a playground in music, and though the album comes off quite serious, there is always a lingering grin behind each furrowed brow.

I Break Horses - Hearts

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I'm sure many people think the dreamy side of Scandanavia has been staked unequivocally by The Ravonettes. For over a decade, the band has created guitar lines that surf their way through wide glass corridors and down avalanches of wild distortion. They have fused together demure harmonies (male/female, which is hard to tell without having seen pictures of them) that come off with a rueful sweetness - like a lover that kisses you and sticks a cigarette in your arm at the same time. But a new wind blows stronger out of the Svensk region - one that is altogether more nocturnal, saccharine and chilling. That frosty gust goes by the name of I Break Horses.

The duo's debut album, Hearts, is a textured glob of washed out melodies and chiming synthesizers, kept in line by pulsing bass drum and stilted snare breaks. Both exciting and distant, the album is reminiscent of a bittersweet relationship caught in an iceblock - the memory of which is darkened by the passing of several years. A cherished memory, but a resented one all the same. Always outlined by luminous pearl white, but always filled in with an inky, obscuring midnight-green. "Winter Beats", which confidently announces the band's existence, shimmers across an ocean of arpeggios, while singer Maria Linden floats just above the surface. Half the time it's too difficult to tell what she's singing - her low, hushed murmurs only reveal a few words in each line. It's almost as if Linden is talking in her sleep, recalling to herself more than anyone else.

Frankly, it's a gorgeous aesthetic. I Break Horses' particular lack of clarity is what makes their debut climb head and shoulders above the competition. There's a desperate intimacy here that most bands can only dream of achieving. Riding along on a crest of distorted synth lines, pushed out again and again, the band never allows you complete surrender, but they also welcome you into their arms, half-asleep, longing for an embrace. The breadth of Hearts is so sullen and anxious, exemplified on "I Kill Your Love, Baby!", where Linden softly sighs the mantra, "I kill your love/Kill your love, baby". I can only imagine this is a kind of inverted anthem for the resentment of waning desire. The relationship has run its course, the passion has gone out. Now all that's left is a slow, selfish death.

My personal favorite of all the songs on Hearts, even though they're all very good, is "Cancer", a slow-build of white-light synthesizer chords and a repeated guitar note ticking away underneath. Linden moans along, almost encouraging the synthesizer to keep going. It all culminates with heavy snare bursts, cascaded over endless cymbals. To me, "Cancer" personifies what the album is all about. It comes off like a eulogy, not only for a love lost, but an expectation never met.

I Break Horses leave all these calloused memories undulating at the mercy of their ocean. Hearts is not an album of answers, and the band never makes any pretense about that. The disenchantment of love and trust is implied, but it's delivered with such a somber resignation that any potential cynicism is disarmed. Foremost, the album is about the glue, the stitching, the nooks and the crannies that exist between our memories and how we perceive them. The space between what we felt we deserved and what we actually got. It is an area where insecurity and satisfaction go hand in hand - a place which only music can adequately describe.