Melbourne quartet CIVIC were determined to shake things up with their third album, Chrome Dipped.
“We’d been pushing a sort of ’70s Australian punk sound with our first two records, but I think we wanted to take it in a different direction,” says guitarist Lewis Hodgson. “I think it was all starting to feel a bit stale.”
“We didn’t really know what we were going to make but we went into it very open for change,” adds vocalist Jim McCullough.
That the band were willing to stray from the raw, distinctly Australian punk rock blueprint of 2021’s Future Forecast and 2023’s Taken By Force – an album awarded four stars by British magazine Mojo, and hailed by NME as “a blunt, muscly rock record that’s constantly on edge” – speaks volumes about the group’s approach to their art. Not content to simply repeat former glories, Chrome Dipped is designed to forge new ones.
There are, of course, some references to their past – the venomous sting of the aptly named “Poison” (a blistering attack on “people talking shit”) and neck-breaking stomp of “The Hogg” (so named because of its “disgusting sounding riff”) summon the filth and fury of the band’s early work, while the frenetic pace of “Fragrant Rice” ensures the group’s famously raucous live shows will remain sweat drenched.
But there are elements here that are the work of a band expanding their boundaries, taking their sound into areas such as shoegaze (the woozy “Kingdom Come”, which also incorporates a country twang) and experimenting with different vocal techniques (McCullough’s robotic delivery in “Fragrant Rice”). Hodgson also admits to injecting the songs with more emotional sincerity than he would have in the past been comfortable with.
“We kind of stuck to the rules a little bit earlier on like, do Australian punk rock properly and all that,” says the guitarist. “But after touring around the world and seeing what all these other bands are up to it’s like, you can really do whatever the fuck you want. And so it’s fun to just kind of let go.”
The process wasn’t without its growing pains. The sprawling “Starting All The Dogs Off” calls to mind the apocalyptic abandon of The Birthday Party and The Scientists, eschewing CIVIC’s militant adherence to rigid and precise song structures in favour of something looser and more instinctive. “Not too long ago that was a bit taboo for us,” smiles Hodgson. “Initially it annoyed me, but it was a good exercise.”
To guide the band – which is completed by bassist Roland Hlavka and drummer Eli Sthapit – to these new sonic pastures they tapped Australian singer-songwriter Kirin J. Callinan to produce the record, and legendary musician and producer Chris Townend to engineer. It was Callinan’s idea to spend a week recording at the Museum of Old and New Art (MONA) in Tasmania, a far cry from the outback house in which CIVIC laid down Taken By Force. “We’ve always done our records DIY,” says McCullough. “This time we wanted to step up and make it sound as big as we could.”
“We kind of gave Kirin the keys on this one,” adds Hodgson. “He would deconstruct songs. So what would initially be more of a punk rock song would turn into the ‘Chrome Dipped’ that you hear. It really helped us, pulling the songs apart and putting them back together.”
It was Callinan’s idea to use a sampled snare drum in the title-track, lending it a mechanical, almost drum machine-like feel. The sensation is repeated on “Trick Pony”, which adds squealing, Big Black-inspired guitar to the mix. This battle between cold, mechanical sounds and the humanity informing each song flows throughout the record, as represented in its title. “I like the idea of Chrome Dipped being a kind of a mindset,” says McCullough. “It’s like a casting of your character, or like an outer shell.”
Underneath that outer shell, however, are very real human emotions. For McCullough, who lost his mother during the writing process, songs such as “Gulls Way” and “Amissus” (a Latin word which translates as ‘loss’) were an opportunity to process her passing and ruminate on matters of life and death. Hodgson describes “Kingdom Come” (on which he performs lead vocals) as “a sort of ballad for a functional drug addict”, inspired by the actions and stories of several friends. “The Hogg” muses on human consciousness and the role of machines in the world, its musical aggression in contrast with its delicate and beautiful lyrical imagery (“sunshine on the ocean floor”).
Hypnotic opener “The Fool” considers the misguided person who “acts like drunken royalty” and thinks they’re “killing it” when in reality they’re doing nothing of the sort (“The fool he wears a crown upon his head/You know it’s made of sticks and absurd string instead”), while “Fragrant Rice” addresses what McCullough calls “the shift of next of kin and the fear of that”. “Swing Of The Noose” posits nihilism as freeing rather than a negative state of mind, while “Starting All The Dogs Off” finds McCullough drawing inspiration from old Australian bush poets to concoct a story of someone on a journey in search of freedom, only for “all these emotions and life things to get in the way”.
Those listening closely may notice the lack of guitar solos throughout these songs – except for some blistering work in “Poison” – a conscious decision on behalf of Hodgson. “I started feeling really inane, because a lot of our songs have a solo,” he smiles. “I think when we played South By Southwest, we had to play the same set three times a day. That really was like, ‘And here’s the solo!’ It was just kind of silly and embarrassing.”
It’s just one more change on a record designed to shake things up and break old patterns. “I hope people feel a little confused at first,” smiles Hodgson, “then a bit angry, and then feel good, and then interested, and then they feel like, ‘Oh, this is sick.’ That process exactly. I hope it’s a bit challenging.”
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