by LE Francis
I wasn’t going to write any more in-depth reviews this year because it’s been a busy one. Then I put the new Civilians self-titled album on & I had to write about it, but I’m going to keep it short, I promise.
Civilians is one of those bands that acknowledges genre, & then just kind of does whatever. There are very jazzy interludes, funky breaks, dreamy pop influences, & driving riffs that could easily fit into something much heavier.
I came across the band because trumpet player Joe Gullace is also in Thank You Scientist, who I got into after they opened for my all-time faves, Protest The Hero, in 2018. Civilians sax player Alex Blade Silver also recently joined TYS & I was able to catch the two of them with the band when they last toured the PNW in June, the shows were spectacular as always!
Anyway, back to Civilians & this album— I expected to like it. I liked their 2017 album “Look Cool!” I have countless writing playlists & I can really appreciate moody music with sparse lyrics/vocals, but this release was something else entirely.
On my first listen, the song that really stood out was “Gwendolyn” which felt like a groovy, honey-throated version of Zappa’s “Stick it out.” The instrumental arrangement in all of these songs is so careful & lush but there is a lot of swing to this one & the vocals are so damn sweet despite delivering, er, strange responses to a monotonous robotic voice.
I also loved the second single “Dead End” & even broke my entirely unserious no-commenting-on-YouTube-rule to praise the dreamy, spaced-out video they released for the single (https://youtu.be/eX4WqdQHrnE). The effect of having layered vocal harmonies laid over the already intricate, ringing tracks lends a sense of immense space in all of these songs. Their first single “Mildew” has a similar feel. Even when the lyrics go a little dark, these are your best dreams, golden & beautiful, harmonies shimmering in the air before they wind down in frantic, cyclic marches that bloom into a whisper of horns.
I need to not go song-by-song with this one or else I’m going to write a novel, but there is not a bad track on this album. Even the entirely instrumental pieces are achingly adept, expressing everything from melancholy to chaos with an ease that transcends language.
There are so many bright & pretty moments on this album, turns in the songs that deliver unrelenting shivers & goosebumps. The way the horns dance under the line “we can begin again” in “My Doll Saves the Day” is particularly breathtaking. The shaky, ethereal vocals swelling with the beat in “Zizmor” are unreasonably beautiful.
The album ends with the moody, classic rock tinged “Long Way Down,” which plays a gently rolling guitar riff against (what I’m guessing is) a heartbreakingly fluent EWI melody, before rolling out on a sweet, lightly distorted vocal line.
The band is from Brooklyn, NY & aside from Gullace & Silver, consists of Trombone player Joonas Lemetyinen, guitarist Tom McCaffrey, drummer Josh Plath, & bassist Osei Kweku. They’re on Instagram @civilians.band & on Bandcamp @civiliansband.
LE Francis is the fiction editor for Sage Cigarettes Magazine.
