here's what jenkins had to say. any other thoughts on the openers?
To answer the first question that will occur to anyone who's seen Clinic perform: Yes, the musicians still wear surgical scrubs and masks.
The Liverpool quartet tinkered slightly with its sound for its new album, "Winchester Cathedral," mostly by slowing it a bit. But the band's show Friday night at the Black Cat was very similar to previous local appearances. Singer Ade Blackburn -- whose voice escapes through a hole in his mask -- switched between guitar, keyboards and melodica, leading snappy songs constructed largely from cyclical melodic motifs and nonsense syllables.
With its brisk ostinatos and clipped rhythms, Clinic invoke early '80s punk-funk, which is undergoing a major revival. Yet that's not the whole of the band's style: Its looping riffs suggest synth-pop, and its "oohs" and "whoas" recall pre-Beatles rock. (Indeed, the new "Falstaff" is almost a doo-wop tune.) The combination is cunning and lively, but -- as the masks exemplify -- somewhat anonymous. If the members of Clinic are ever going to expand their music beyond its formal cleverness, they'll have to reveal a little more of themselves.
Sons and Daughters, the impressive Glasgow quartet that preceded Clinic, played propulsive modal rock, but with a hint of Appalachian airs (and their British antecedents). This band also swapped instruments frequently, with singers Adele Bethel and Scott Paterson playing guitar, bass and keyboards, and Ailidh Lennon alternating between bass and mandolin. The foursome never sounded like commonplace alt-country, and made a point of stripping every vestige of twang from one of its best songs, the driving "Johnny Cash."
The evening began with the optimistically named High Water Marks, a American-Norwegian quartet that matched dirty guitars to clean vocals, most of them sung by sometime Apples in Stereo member Hilarie Sidney.
-- Mark Jenkins
