By now, you know what to expect from Clinic: surf guitars tangling with one-chord garage-rock riffs, Moe Tucker-ish tom-tom beats, occasional dub-like melodica and barely decipherable, bent, sinister vocals hissed through surgical masks. But Visitations (Domino), the Liverpool band’s fourth full-length, is surprising because the formula doesn’t sound tired. If anything, the album is more alive than 2004’s comparatively calm Winchester Cathedral or 2002’s polished Walking With Thee. Its 12 brief tracks, only one of which tops three-and-a-half minutes, offer variations on familiar themes but add some new colors. “Tusk” is a punk rave-up; “Jigsaw Man” is an acoustic drone; autoharp zithers through “If You Could Read Your Mind”; wah-wah guitar effects surface on “Animal/Human”; ghostly horns begin and end “Harvest (Within You).” Like the Jesus And Mary Chain, Clinic established its modus operandi from its inception, and to expect the band to evolve is to miss the point. Visitations doesn’t produce the novel shock that greeted Clinic’s debut single (1997’s “IPC Subeditors Dictate Our Youth”), but it does find new rewards within predictable parameters.

Vocalist/keyboardist Ade Blackburn spoke with MAGNET from his home on a leisurely Sunday. Presumably, he wasn’t wearing a mask at the time.

I may be off-base with this because the vocals and the lyrics aren’t always easy to figure out, but I get the sense that the line “Animal or human, can you tell?” from “Animal/Human” is a central idea of Visitations. There is some consideration of primal instincts going on. Am I making something out of nothing, or is that an accurate statement?
I completely agree with that, actually. I think what it is is more like looking, on quite a few of the songs, at people’s behavior and how it ranges from something which is really kind of basic, an almost selfish, animalistic side, and then there’s a more altruistic side. There’s a battle between the two a lot of the time.

What are some of the other songs that that comes up in?
I think “Family,” the first song: there’s the line in that that says, “Come again tomorrow, with your love not sorrow.” It’s a person not addressing somebody else; it’s actually addressing themselves, you know? The final song, “Visitations,” fits in. Its last line is “hunted by yourself”: so it’s that ongoing dilemma of someone comparing the good against the bad side of himself, perhaps knowing the path that he should follow but there’s always the temptation to stray.

“If You Could Read Your Mind” seems to go back to that question, too.
Yeah, it turns back in on itself with the same kind of inner questioning.

Should we read some roots in your background in clinical psychology into all that, or is it coming more out of a natural response to the world around you?
I’d say it’s a more natural response to the world. I sort of see it as now, in what is supposed to be progress and sophistication in everything around us in terms of technology, that the same battle between sophistication and animal, primitive instincts always seems to be there no matter how much money or pleasant surroundings you’ve got.

There’s something primitive and primal about the palette you work with in Clinic. What are some of the advantages and disadvantages of working with a minimalist approach, for want of a better term?
I think one of the advantages is that something can have an urgency and an edge to it if it is more primitive sounding. It will always have some connection to people; there’s an energy to it, and people will always respond to that. On the flipside of it, to some people it can seem too raw or too basic. I like the way it divides opinions on it. To me, more primitive music, something that isn’t technically particularly great and has a bit more amateur feel to it, seems far more real.

Visitations is your fourth album. Is it more difficult to retain that less polished, more primitive side when you’ve gotten good at it?
We recorded all the songs ourselves this time around—it’s the first time that we’ve done that—and it was done naturally on analog equipment, not on expensive equipment, so we knew that we’d get an unpolished, raw sound. That seems like a key element to it now. We tried something more polished on Walking With Thee, but I feel more comfortable with a more raw sound, basically.

There are still some new sounds that surface in the album. I’m thinking of the wah-wah pedal guitar sound that comes up in “Animal/Human” and some other songs. And there are horns or something at the beginning and ending of “Children Of The Kellogg.”
Yeah, it is kind of a basic riff, and to switch into something like [the horns] is kind of a ludicrous thing to happen, putting something smooth next to a really dirty sound.

You get that on the record with the sequencing of a punk song like “Tusk” followed by the slow, almost dub-like “Paradise.”
Exactly. When I listen to music, if you get an album, even if it’s a really great album, if it’s one rock and roll song after another, no matter how good they are, it seems to lessen the effect. I think if there’s a jump spanning a great difference between tracks, it’s an easier way in.

In the past, you’ve acknowledged that you like to lift from songs from the past, but I didn’t pick out as many allusions on this album. One of my questions is, am I missing anything? But also, the drum pattern on “Harvest (Within You)” sounds familiar, but I don’t know if I should recognize it.
As we have gone on, I think we’ve been able to perhaps use something that is kind of hinting at something else rather than just taking bits and putting them in a different context. “Harvest” reminds me of Can or Serge Gainsbourg, but it’s still not one particular song.

There’s a lightheartedness to that song that balances out the sinister aspects of some others.
Always when we are putting the songs together, if we think there’s too much of one thing, we will throw something else into the mix to balance it out. If there’s something menacing, it’s always good to have a more fun, entertaining sound, whether it be something more off the wall like the autoharp or sound effects like the gong intro to “Harvest.” It can give it depth if you get to the end of the album and you’re not quite certain if the impression was sinister or entertaining, so you’ve got to go and listen back to it to fully get the gist of what it was.

You plan to tour the States in the spring. Still wearing the surgical masks?
Yeah, we’re still wearing them. We’ve got a few more quite stupid visual elements that we’re finalizing at the moment, so it will be different from when we played last time.