Clinic have never been ones to heed conventional wisdom, the logistics of singing through surgical masks being but the first of many aesthetic hurdles they've erected between themselves and pop accessibility. After all, here is a band that, in an attempt to overcome the seven-album itch-- and possibly give themselves something new to talk about with interviewers after 15 years in the game-- turned to acclaimed sound-collagist Daniel Lopatin (a.k.a. Oneohtrix Point Never) to mix their 2012 release Free Reign, only to shelve all but two of his submissions. You could sense that second-guessing on the final product: While Free Reign saw the band stretching out more than usual, with its psychedelic drones and funkier grooves, the album was still quintessentially, claustrophobically Clinic, caught between competing desires to expand the band's sound without dramatically altering it.
But Free Reign's shortcomings aren't anything some corrective surgery can't fix. And so, just months after the album's release, we have Free Reign II, which is not so much a remix album or a sequel companion piece as a complete do-over-- the U.K. indie equivalent of Bobby Ewing suddenly turning up in your morning shower. Free Reign II reinstates Lopatin's original mixes (plus new ones for "Miss You" and "You", the two songs of his that made the previous cut) and resequences the album in reverse order. But while this may read like some egregious ploy to make fans buy the same record twice-- song titles are merely appended with a "II"-- they should be thankful Clinic are going through with the plan. In this revised form, Free Reign is elevated from an intriguing if flawed work into the band's most consistently illuminating and sonically adventurous album since 2002's Walking With Thee.
In Lopatin's hands, Free Reign's subliminal textural details take the starring role, smashing through the original's glass-ceiling containment to reveal a vaster sense of space and far greater dramatic tension. The album's low-key, wandering closer, "The Sun and Moon" is reborn as Free Reign II's deliriously disorienting opener, its Manzarekian organ pumps amplified into glass-shattering tremors and free-jazz sax squeaks heigthening the carnivalistic clamor. On the original Free Reign, the blissed-out reverie "Misty" gradually eased you into the record, establishing a slack, laissez faire tone; here, "Sun and the Moon II" violently thrusts you in, foreshadowing the more turbulent funhouse experience to come. Even the found-sound recordings of children at play that permeate "You" assume a more sinister, predatory tenor on "You II", their increasingly mutated voices fusing into the sheets of guitar noise that eventually consume the song. In this revamped context, the ascendant organ drone that rises above the song's fiery outro feels less like a simple Suicide tribute and more like a spacecraft escape from an exploding planet.
Lopatin can't rehabilitate every track-- "Cosmic Radiation" is still a scatterbrained psych-jazz scribble of a song. But his gnarlier mix and flipped-script sequencing do wonders for what was Free Reign's most rudimentary turn, "See Saw". Where the original overemphasized its temper-tantrum bashed beat and remedial, morse-code melodica riff to the point of annoyance-- its position as second-track nearly derailing Free Reign's momentum from the get-go-- the song is utterly transformed into Free Reign II's explosive side-two climax. It's the moment where all the strategic soundscaping Lopatin has exercised over the course of the record comes to a head: The drums stomp with crater-inducing force, the guitars turn several degrees thicker and nastier, Blackburn's impetuous vocal is reverbed into a more antagonistic scowl, and whole thing swirls and snarls like a fairground attraction spun out of control. And in its wake, "Misty II" finds its true calling as the album's comedown closer, sending us adrift on a billowy bed of analog-synth starbursts. (It's followed by a tacked-on bonus track, "Done and Dusted II" that hearkens back to the motorik bounce of early singles like "The Second Line", but doesn't quite fit with the album's droning, cerebral vibe; nor does it give Lopatin much opportunity to go crazy on the console.)
One can only imagine that Clinic's reticience to initially release this vastly superior version of Free Reign can be chalked up to misgivings about showcasing Lopatin's textural trickery at the expense of the group's performances. But Free Reign II is precisely the sort of risky, rejuvenating album Clinic needed at this point in their career, one that audaciously upends the perception that this band just releases the same album over and over. Sadly, it's been brought to market as a secondary, supplemental release whose belated appearance may have bypassed the window of opportunity to recapture some of the considerable buzz the band enjoyed back at the turn of the millennium and re-stoke the interest of fans who may have tuned out since. At the very least, it puts lie to that old shampoo-ad slogan: sometimes, you do a get a second chance to make a seventh impression.
