If the name doesn’t immediately spring to mind, go back to the 2003 Grammy awards, where Clinic‘s Walking With Thee was a nominee for Best Alternative Album, and you should recall the Liverpool-based four-piece. The band is back this year with their fourth longplayer, Visitations, an album recorded entirely at home in their Liverpool-based studio, where the band claims to have found more musical freedom.

The album has been called a party record, but just what kind of party the band had in mind is up for question. Ethereal choral vocals and plodding guitar riffs run alongside sweeping melodies that, while they don’t bring to mind typical images of a big bash, do conjure a strange lightheartedness, albeit mixed with the occasional haunted minor chord.

Visitations is out January 30, 2007 on Domino.

Track List

1. Family
2. Animal/Human
3. Gideon
4. harvest (within you)
5. Tusk
6. Paradise
7. Children of Kellogg
8. If You Could Read Your Mind
9. Jigsaw Man
10. Interlude
11. The New Seeker
12. Visitations