Clinker’s ‘Tick Tickety Boom!’ is their 14th album in 15 years. You certainly couldn’t accuse them of being slack, which runs entirely contra to the stoned-out swaying psychedelic sound their espouse so adeptly. Pitched as ‘A year in the life of Clinker. A year of health issues, poverty, sanctions and a coalition government. Happy times,’ ‘Tick Tickety Boom!’ could justifiably be called a sonic journey, but what’s more is that it reveals a band who for all their trippy psychedelic leanings clearly haven’t lost touch with reality.
If the idea of kicking an album off with a sprawling 10-minute epic sounds like madness, then so be it: Clinker aren’t the band for you. But ‘Let’s Go!’ is a slow-building, slow-burning fade-in, which alludes to soul and gospel as it gently washes in on ripples of delicate guitar. Dirty, fractured work eventually begins to cloud the sky as a rolling bass bucks and bounces into the mix, the looping repetitions taking a cumulative effect.
‘Running Hi (Lo) is pure 60s jangle, vocal harmonies and Hammond organs aswirl over an insistent beat, and ‘Keep Ticking Along’ mellows things out with a wonky acoustic strum over a shuffling baggy beat. If at times it feels like Clinker are passing the time, it’s because the music is articulating the ennui of the world we find ourselves, suffocated and static, and as demonstrated in tracks like ‘The Tick and the Tock (A Jobseeker’s Tale)’ and the grouchily downbeat ‘What I Am And What I Get,’ a heavy, driving number that’s driven by a propulsive rhythms and a grainy bass and diffused in a sonic haze.
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These are bleak times: the much-touted economic recovery doesn’t seem to have reached the majority of people who aren’t banking execs or otherwise involved in the construction industry; job-hunting is a full-time job in itself and forging any kind of existence as an artist is nigh on impossible. ‘Tick Tickety Boom!’ isn’t all doom and gloom, but it is very much an album that holds a mirror to the social, political and musical landscape.
Clinker Online
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