Civic Pride

Like many of the finer things in my life it started with a visit to Probe Records one lunchtime. As I leafed through the new releases, always my first port of call there* I became aware they were playing something fast, crunchy and catchy. I asked what it was and ended up, selfishly taking their last copy.

That something fast, crunchy and catchy was CIVIC Taken By Force. Reader, I married it.

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Melbourne punks CIVIC released Taken By Force in February this year, I stumbled across them in June and it has been in pretty heavy rotation ever since. The hype label promises ‘1984 meets Endless Summer’ over a grainy picture of a surfer and yeah I get that, but Taken By Force is much much more too.

CIVIC have a sharp propulsive style and yeah, it is kinda punk but in the best Aussie punk tradition it is all tamped down with a healthy wad of blue collar rock. Thus in common with the Saints, Radio Birdman and Cosmic Psychos their sound is defiantly and uncliché-y rocky**.

The band serve notice with the martial drum and siren of intro ‘Dawn’ and then they hit us with ‘End Of The Line’, riding us hard with those guitars. I LOVE the way that CIVIC are a twin guitar band, Lewis Hodgson and Jackson Harry giving it their all.

The bands’ pop smarts are evident on the title track which has a great melody, great rhythmic stops and starts, all topped off by a frankly awesome jagged guitar solo. It was recently awarded that most exclusive of accolades, the Mrs 1537 nod of approval^. Then CIVIC hit the afterburners for the nicely antisocial ‘Fly Song’, where the influence of producer Rob Younger can surely be heard in its alluringly serrated edges.

Desperation, a bleeding romance
Worn on your sleeve and inside your pants

The bustling, positively power chorded ‘Born In The Heat’ is up next and I get a real whiff of the Saints about this track, no mean feat at all. It’s fucking great. To follow it with the necessarily creepy ‘Neighbourhood Sadist’ is great sequencing, the rhythm section of Roland Hlavka and Matt Blach prominent in driving this one with a slight hint of the Sex Pistols ‘New York’.

Then we’ve reached the top of the mountain and its a fast exhilarating no brakes ride down with ‘Time Girl’, ‘Wars Or Hands Of Time’ and ‘Blood Rushes’, the latter has a great urgent positive melodic vibe about it.

Then we’ve reached ‘Dusk’ an atmospheric where the band get to wave goodbye to us, left bedraggled exhausted ands spent, spreadeagled on the sand.

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Taken By Force is a real ripper of an LP and CIVIC have very much crafted their own sound on their own terms here. Sure there are nods to their sainted birdman ancestors here and there, but this rock is very much theirs.

I really recommend Taken By Force to you all, bands this urgent, unpretentious and powered-up don’t come this way nearly often enough.

1210 Down (under).

*mostly to look for LPs on coloured vinyl with lots of sweary song titles and/or cover nudity/monsters. True story.

**Rob Younger from Radio Birdman produces here.

^I’ve been striving for that myself for some 30 years now.