It's hard not to feel a bit of sympathy for Clinic. When they hit the ground running in the late 1990s, they were greeted with such an intense blizzard of critical acclaim that they were damned never to live up to the expectations set for them. Their fingerprint, first established on a series of excellent early EPs and solidified on their unremittingly brilliant debut album Internal Wrangler, is unmistakable: Drawing from dub, surf-rock, doo-wop, psych, British jazz, girl groups, the Velvet Underground, and everything in between, it's a sound that stimulates countless record-collector pleasure centers. And yet, for whatever reason, their successive albums have all felt relatively lacking, failing to fully recapture the diversity of their debut.
Now comes Funf, a collection of odds and ends pulled from the steady flow of three-song singles that have accompanied each of Clinic's albums, covering the period from Internal Wrangler through last year's Visitations. Funny enough, the random, fractured flow of the disc is the closest the band has come to recreating the aesthetic their fans have pined for since Walking With Thee changed the script with its consistent, icy sound. Unfortunately, the quality of the material widely varies.
The disc opens with "The Majestic", from the "Return of Evil Bill" single, an instrumental track that might have served as an alternate Internal Wrangler opener if "Voodoo Wop" hadn't bettered it. Radiating the haunted surf vibe Clinic have often explored, it packs enough material for a whole suite into just two minutes. The alpha, however, is quickly followed by the omega: "The Magician" B-side "Nicht" is just horrible, an overdistorted punk rant that transforms familiar Clinic territory into a dense, impenetrable mess. Nothing else on Funf approaches this nadir, but much of it comes off as subpar variations on sounds they've delivered more capably elsewhere. The "Second Line" single's "Magic Boots" is like a less memorable, vocal version of "Hippie Death Suite", for instance, while "Christmas" (off "Come Into Our Room") falls somewhere between "Earth Angel" and "Goodnight Georgie". With its jazz-inflected, smoothly flowing guitar part and well-placed hook, "Christmas" is something of a rarity on Funf: a well-executed run that actually earns its inclusion.
There are a couple of others here that deserve another look. "The Castle" (from the flip of "The Return of Evil Bill") is one of the record's best tracks, employing the overdriven organ sound of "2nd Foot Stomp" and spotlighting a classic, clenched-teeth vocal from frontman Ade Blackburn. "Lee Shan", originally a B-side to "Harvest (Within You)", rides a repeated piano phrase through a cavern of Spector-esque reverb, but instead of a Carole Kaye bassline and a soaring vocal, we get Blackburn's paranoia and nail-biting surf guitar with a bit of spooky reed organ. It's a good example of Clinic doing their best to subvert the expectations set up by the obviousness of the influences at work in their music.
Apart from these, there are a couple of surf-style tracks that sound kind of cool but don't feature much in the way of melody, some other tracks that were obviously left aside in favor of better ones, and a handful of go-nowhere experiments like "Dissolution; The Dream of Bartholomew", which aimlessly meanders between passages of stinging fuzz guitar and twinkly noises. Clinic completists aren't likely to find much of note here, as they'll already own all of these tracks and more (the collection is far from definitive, leaving off several b-sides, including "Stardust", "The Sphinx", "Saxon Road", "Cutting Grass", and "Mechanical Madrigal"), but those open to traversing the band's more haphazard experiments may find a few fleeting moments of worth.
