Moments after putting up yesterday's post, I hopped over to Pitchfork to find that Clinic has a new album coming out. I was about to leap back here to revise my post and add Clinic to my "tentatively curious/excited" list, but it turns out the October release date is for Europe only. The geniuses at Domino prefer to let it leak illegally in the US for three months and then release it to lackluster legitimate sales in January.
Since when do record labels even release anything in January? It is notoriously the worst month of the year to release anything, anything at all, as retail stores across the nation are busy returning their unsold Xmas stock and bringing their inventory levels as low as possible in anticipation of tax season. But now we have both Clinic and the Shins to look forward to in that dreary month. Why the delay, if both albums are ready now? Especially since, as I made plain yesterday, the season looks so pathetic? (It's doubly curious as to why Sub Pop would choose to skip over Christmas for the Shins, or why, assuming that was unavoidable, they choose to dump it in such a low-profile month.)
Meanwhile, back to Clinic: P'fork has an "exclusive" video for Clinic's first single, "Harvest (within You)"—though I don't quite get how it's exclusive, what with that big YouTube logo in the lower-right corner. Anyway, the song is good, and video is kooky. Production values aside, it looks straight out of the early '80—all high-concept/no-logic. It's totally absurd, and sort of made me want to watch a Men Without Hats video.
