No matter how wide your music collection, it doesn’t take long before you find yourself steering back towards the same few tracks. Even if you’ve filled the 160Gb of your iPod classic, the chances are that you’ll find yourself reverting back to the same 100 or so songs when you’re flicking through. It’s a difficult elite to break into, an incredible challenge, but one of which Civil Civic are likely to be able to match. At the most basic, it would be simple to call them an instrumental duo, but they’re nowhere near as pretentious, dry and tiresome as that sounds. having known each other in their homeland of Australia before both ventured to Europe, separately settling in London and Barcelona, which is when they decided to start making music together.
If they lead a fractured musical relationship, their music makes the best possible use of it, utilising jagged, interwoven guitar parts that duck and dive in amongst each other, a friendly battle played out to the backing of a metronomic synth. They are spiky, challenging and, most importantly, invigorating – this is kind of stuff all those Crystal Castles clones knocking about couldn’t even dream of pulling off. Measured breakdowns are tempered with melodic riffs, excellently distorted – it genuinely feels like a thrill-ride, the soundtrack to some amazing futuristic racing game that no-one has thought up yet. Their main gift still remains how utterly catchy they’ve managed to make some songs that are completely bereft of vocals, their songs remaining a dizzyingly heady tonic even after many, many repeat listens. Definitely candidates to top your most played list.
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