CIVIC

Words by Andrew Handley

Vocalist McCullough was struck with Covid, which meant the band rescheduled their headline show at Max Watts. “It’s how it goes, I guess,” he says casually.

The Melbourne punk rockers’ headline show at the sizable Max Watts represents a band that has been on the rise since their debut EP New Vietnam came out in 2018. Coupled with their blistering live shows, Civic have since established themselves as a powerhouse in the Melbourne live music scene and beyond.

The band played The Forum and The Enmore in 2022, “which was always a dream of mine,” he says. “You can play the same venues for the rest of your life if you want, that’s all good, [but] it’s cool to check out what’s going on behind these old stages and seeing how it works.”

The band has already recorded their second album Taken By Force, which is due out early this year. The album was fittingly recorded with producer Rob Younger, frontman of the seminal Australian punk band Radio Birdman, with Australian punk legend Mikey Young of Total Control and Eddy Current Suppression Ring having mixed and mastered the record.

Like Future Forecast that preceded it, Taken By Force captures the band’s live intensity. “I guess our sound is pretty energetic and fast… so definitely trying to capture that on record,” says Hodgson.

The new members of the band, Jim McCullough and Jackson Harry, have helped expand the band’s sound. “They’re both pretty accomplished musicians in their own right,” says Hodgson. “They’re from pretty different backgrounds, so it’s been good to have a bit of diversity in sounds.”

“Blachie was living with Jim, and he plays in The Murlocs and Beans. Jackson I’ve known since high school, but we bumped into each other during lockdown, and we needed someone on guitar so he fit the bill.”

The band built a studio in the house Harry grew up in, in Elphinstone. “We were in the dining room… [which] made the drum sound really boomy … it was makeshift, but it sounded great.”

“It doesn’t really matter how much noise you make out in Elphinstone, that’s kind of the point of it.”

Hodgson says the band went into the recording with more of an open mind than their previous record. “It’s a bit more diverse in the styles of songs I think we’ve written,” he says. “We’ve also added new sounds through it.”

“There’s acoustic guitar, which I would have probably never done back in the day, but now I’m all about it. There are 12-strings, different percussions through it, and more emphasis on backup vocals and melodies. I think previously it was a bit more straight up 70s style.”

One of the standout tracks from the new album is Trick of the Light, a slower track that breaks the five-minute mark where most come in at under three. “I can see us doing more songs like that, or in any other kind of way,” says Hodgson.

“It’s gotten to the point with Civic [where] I’m not going to try and write songs that sound like Civic songs [because] you end trying to sound like yourself [which] is kind of weird.”

The album’s first single End of the Line has an accompanying video directed by New Zealand-born filmmaker James Gorter. “We were able to leave that up to James because Jim had been following him for a while and just liked his style,” says Hodgson. “When it came to getting the first edit back, I was like ‘that’s better than I could even imagine.’”

The video matches the intensity of the song, with a spotlight shining on members of the band as they play in a pitch-black room. “Someone’s going around with a camera with a spotlight attached to it, and getting in your face,” explains Hodgson. “We had to do a couple of run-throughs because the first time we were just like ‘what the fuck,” he laughs.

Taken By Force comes out February 10 on Cooking Vinyl Australia. Civic are playing at Down South Fest in Port Fairy on February 25 and at Brunswick Music Festival on March 10.