Filling in for his bandmate Jim McCullough, Civic guitarist Lewis Hodgson speaks over the phone late one afternoon. “Sorry, I just got home from work, I don’t want to make it sound stupid,” he laughs.
Vocalist McCullough has been struck with Covid, which also meant the band rescheduled their headline show at Max Watts. “It’s how it goes, I guess,” he says casually.
The Melbourne punk rocker’s 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. Since then the band has released two more EPs and their debut album Future Forecast in 2021 to critical acclaim. Coupled with their blistering live shows, Civic has established themselves as a powerhouse in the Melbourne live music scene and beyond.
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Hodgson is excited about playing in larger venues. “Big venues are good as long as there are people in them,” he laughs. The band played The Forum and The Enmore earlier this year, “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 next year. The album was fittingly recorded with producer Rob Younger, frontman of the seminal Australian punk band Radio Birdman. “We’re big fans of the albums he’s done [with] Birdman and The New Christ,” says Hodgson. “But he’s quite prolific in the amount of albums he’s been behind, like good Australian records like The Celibate Rifles and The Eastern Dark.”
Another Australian punk legend has made his mark on Taken By Force. Mikey Young of Total Control and Eddy Current Suppression Ring mixed and mastered the record. “We’ll pass it on to him with not much input at all and just see what he does, and then we’ll hear it and from there we can do some fine-tuning and notes,” explains Hodgson. “This time we went into his studio and spent a day pulling apart each song, not that there was much to do [except] sit in there and listen to the songs on this crazy sound system.”
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. “As far as the albums go by, not that we’ve done that many, we got more involved in the production side, so it becomes more fun. Less about exactly capturing what you’re going to see live, and chucking in some overdubs and stuff.”
Hodgson says the whole band has become more involved in the production of the record, especially drummer Matt Blach, who newly joined the band with guitarist Jackson Harry before recording the record. “He’s quite good at recording, so I spent a couple of nights in the recording process with him, just tweaking little ideas that you can spend hours on,” explains Hodgson. “I think everyone’s into the process of making a record, which can be a nightmare but can also be pretty fun, and thankfully this time it was pretty fun.”
The new members of the band 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.”
Taken By Force was recorded at Harry’s father’s house, just out outside of Castlemaine. “Technically it was in Elphinstone, so that’s like a 15-minute drive out, I just don’t want to do wrong by Elphinstone,” laughs Hodgson. “The plan was to go out there for a week and come back with an album.”
The band built a studio in the house Harry grew up in. “We were in the dining room… [which] made the drum sound really boomy, and had a guitar amp in his sister’s room, so it was makeshift, but it sounded great,” says Hodgson. “It doesn’t really matter how much noise you make out in Elphinstone, that’s kind of the point of it.”
The band went into the session with the album mostly written. “I think we had about eight pretty much done songs and then maybe two or three just like ‘we’re going to have to figure this out there,’” explains Hodgson. “We all pieced it together as a band which was good.
“[For] two days we just set up and rehearsed and recorded some demo stuff, and then Rob came in on the third day. We had five days with him and we just smashed it out. It was kind of crazy, the timing of it all because we all had to get back to somewhere at the end of [it]. We were laying the very last overdubs down in the remaining hours.”
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 who wrote the song. “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.”
“I just write what comes I guess. There are some songs I’ve written recently in there [that are] not at the same tempo as our usual stuff. I’m pretty happy to just go whichever direction we want now.”
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 the Palace Foreshore on December 10, Barwon Club on December 15, Sooki Lounge on December 16 and Pelly Bar – Pier Hotel on December 17.
