Sometime in 2007, there started to be a movement among some videogame critics to progress beyond the usual Consumer Reports-style reviews that ticked off the list of Music/Visuals/Controls/Gameplay. Rather, they began to get more overtly subjective and personal in the way that music critics did in the mid-to-late 60s. As a medium matures, its parallel journalism/criticism does, too. And so it came to be that certain phrases or terms were signalled out as useless for consumers; lazy shorthand for things that better writers would explain more explicitly. One of these phrases was "compelling gameplay." This is either a backhanded compliment or a straightforward one and tells the reader nothing. Yet I have to admit that sometimes, even as seasoned and good as my writing skills can be, I sometimes find it impossible to precisely say why I like something, and in the case of music, why I can't stop listening to it.
Still with me?? Good.
Mythomania is compelling. Sorry, but that's the only way I explain why I keep listening to it and yet don't think it's a great album. But I'll go into more detail just for the sake of argument.
I saw Cryptacize open for Sufjan Stevens earlier this Fall, and while at the time I (and seemingly the rest of the crowd) thought they were ok but not outstanding, something about their music stuck with me. There was something, dare I say, compelling about it. As Cryptacize count Chris Cohen as a member, a man who used to be in Deerhoof, and have a female singer with a cute-ish voice, they kind of remind me of what a more "normal" (for lack of a better term) version of Deerhoof might've sounded like. It's not entirely fair to compare the two bands since they're trying for different things, so I'll just let it drop there.
Anyway, Cryptacize play a brand of slightly playful indie rock. Rather than the jagged chords and unpredictable noise-pop of his days in Deerhoof, here Cohen employs a more grooving 60s style that some have likened to surf music. 'Blue Tears' opens with a borderline ska-like part from him, while 'My Thomania' brings to mind 60s girl groups with its wide eyed vocals and strutting, distorted guitar lines. Meanwhile, 'One Block Wonders' has quickly become one of my most played songs lately. The band opened their set with it at the show I saw, and the way it slowly builds from a simple drum line just turns some kind of key in some kind of lock in my brain.
However, when Cryptacize let Cohen sing or slow things down too much, everything falls apart. 'What You Can't See Is' is the sort of song where you feel embarrassed for the band, with its simplistic sentiments about identity and Cohen's deadpan delivery. Moreover, 'Galvanize' sounds like Beach House on a bad day, lacking any of the great production or rich melodies of that band. All of this just hammers home the uneven quality of Mythomania. There's six pretty good songs here and five weak ones, and while I'm too lazy to attempt my own order, I always get the feeling that the album is poorly paced.
And yet, there is something compelling about Mythomania. I noted in another review that I don't think Clinic's Walking With Thee is a particularly great album yet I used to listen to it a lot and still sometimes do. Well, this's a similar situation. Mythomania is not great but it's got a half dozen good songs and I still keep listening to it every couple days. Call it a compulsion.
Sometimes my perception of a band is forever tainted by the fact that the first album I heard of their's was a lesser work. This happened to me with Sigur Ros, who's Agaetis Byrjun is reportedly a masterpiece but I unfortunately settled for () instead, an album that has a half hour of great material but is padded out to more than twice that with samey sounding stuff. I fell into this exact same trap with Clinic, reading that Internal Wrangler was great but ended up getting their Walking With Thee instead because I liked the video for the eponymous song. As it turned out, Walking With Thee was about 20 minutes of great material with 15 minutes of samey sounding stuff. History repeats itself.
Well, I've still never gone back to Sigur Ros, but I did recently finally get around to Internal Wrangler during my ongoing process of compiling a list of the best albums of this decade. And while I can see why people might've gone crazy for this album back in 2000, I'm not sure, with the remove of time and a critical lens on my side, that I would call it a masterpiece. It's one of those four stars out of five "masterpieces" that was overly praised on its releases and is in need of a critical re-evaluation. Mind you, I don't come here to bury Internal Wrangler. It's still a pretty great album with a handful of excellent songs. It's just not in the same tier as 2000 contemporaries like Kid A and The Moon & Antarctica.
The problem with the album, and Clinic in general, is that they sound like an amalgamation of various sounds/influences and never transcend these. As Pitchfork put it in a review of Funf, they draw "...from dub, surf-rock, doo-wop, psych, British jazz, girl groups, the Velvet Underground, and everything in between." I would simplify this by saying they sound like 60s rock, with organs and harmonicas showing up frequently, set to modern day head nodding beats and treble heavy production. The Velvet Underground comment rings especially true for me, since 'Earth Angel' starts out sounding a lot like 'Some Kinda Love' while 'Distortions' lyrically borrows (steals??) from 'Candy Says', with its "I'd to know completely what other's so discretely talk about" line. Meanwhile, the raucous 'C.Q.' sounds like a particularly coked up 60s garage rock band--didn't anybody tell Clinic that this sort of pastiche would be more popular in 2001, when The Strokes and White Stripes blew up??
Internal Wrangler is an enjoyable album nonetheless. In fact, I used to listen to Walking With Thee a lot despite thinking it's generally weak. So why did I listen to it so much?? To be perfectly up front with you, I didn't know why back then and I still don't know why now. But I digress. Internal Wrangler is the better of the two but it retains that same compelling, listenable quality despite my reservations about. I think it's probably just the sheer sound and the head nodding quality I wrote about earlier. After all, Clinic's singing/lyrics are only memorable on the ballads, and I've never found their melodies, in general terms, particularly catchy or interesting. There are exceptions, but once the novelty of Clinic's sound wore off, most people stop following the band. By all accounts their post-Walking albums are solid if unexceptional.
In the end, Clinic are one of those unfortunate cases where a band produces a pretty good, interesting debut album that gets overrated on release, and they never manage to make anything that's better and/or different enough. Let's set the cliche of how hipsters and music critics often lift their nose in the air, knowingly, and pronounce that a band's first album was "better", because in the case of Internal Wrangler it's not a cliche. I don't know that I'd say everyone needs some Clinic in their lives, but if you happen to feel that you do, Internal Wrangler is where it begins and ends.
Sometime in 2007, there started to be a movement among some videogame critics to progress beyond the usual Consumer Reports-style reviews that ticked off the list of Music/Visuals/Controls/Gameplay. Rather, they began to get more overtly subjective and personal in the way that music critics did in the mid-to-late 60s. As a medium matures, its parallel journalism/criticism does, too. And so it came to be that certain phrases or terms were signalled out as useless for consumers; lazy shorthand for things that better writers would explain more explicitly. One of these phrases was "compelling gameplay." This is either a backhanded compliment or a straightforward one and tells the reader nothing. Yet I have to admit that sometimes, even as seasoned and good as my writing skills can be, I sometimes find it impossible to precisely say why I like something, and in the case of music, why I can't stop listening to it.
