If you’re looking for an antidote to the predictable seasonal deluge of summertime’s breezy pop pabulum, you could do worse than Clinic’s fifth full-length. Slanted toward the “rock” side of the art-rock continuum, Do It! is a prickly record filled with dense guitars, stuttering rhythms and vocals alternately blared and whispered. It’s art pop, but it’s pop to be sure; sharing fewer affinities with Trout Mask Replica than Safe As Milk, Do It! aims for the heart more often than the head, and its avant-garde flourishes are usually designed to underpin song structure rather than explode it. “Free Not Free” tempers its shaky tremolo with frontman Ade Blackburn’s open, vulnerable vocals, and every now and then a buzzing, distorted guitar line breaks up the prettiness just enough to remind you that nothing stays fragile forever; eventually it collapses or grows tough. The similarly tense “Corpus Christi” slinks along on a sinister drone, but it’s propelled by thoroughly ordinary hi-hat percussion. A few songs indulge in expected moves from the art-rock playbook (check the atonal, squalling horns on “Shopping Bag”), but Do It! is accessible enough to appeal to both curious indie-pop fans and avant musos without an obscurantist chip on their shoulders. [www.dominorecordco.us]
—Eric Waggoner
