Civil Villains continue their climb with the release of their hugely fascinating debut album, Motion Sick, out Friday 26th May. With influences panning from Queens Of the Stone Age to Tom Waits, the record is a diverse piece. To find out more, we exclusively spoke to band and asked them for this track by track breakdown of the album:
Funeral Rouge
The album format might not hold much sway these days but us three still believe in constructing a flow and doing a bit of musical storytelling. This piece just felt like a solid way to open the album, a bit of a statement of intent. The ethereal sounds at the very start are a mixture of singing bowls and a gong played by Toby’s sister, Josephine.
Mortuary Blue [video]
I believe this track actually came out of what I’d describe as a…rockabilly(?) style riff we used to have a lot of fun with – the lyrics speak to the idea of existing in a zombie-like, somnambulist state, where a misplaced sense of loyalty, obligation, allegiance to a one-sided relationship is making you, and inevitably those around you, sick.
Bayou Autonomy
A torrent of frustration as you watch helplessly from the sidelines, Bayou Autonomy follows on from the themes and the toxic relationship defined in Mortuary Blue. The lyrics are probably the most blunt and conversational I’ve written to this point. Mark came to us with the whole chorus ready to go and the verses pull from something I wrote when I was 21. Probably my favourite of the heavier tracks.
Cornerstore
“The modern dogma is comfort at any cost.” I love this Aldo Leopold quote, and it’s sort of a thematic jumping off point for Cornerstore, as well as some of the other tracks – we’re talking conservation, capitalism, consumerism. I’ve also been really inspired by writers like Wendell Berry, Sophie Raeworth, Roman Krznaric (check them out!) Their work definitely helped inform some of the lines throughout the song. I’m poking fun at myself a bit in the chorus – I’m a big proponent of voting with your wallet, but conscious consumerism is still consumerism and I don’t reckon we can buy ourselves out of ecological collapse!
Elysium
Compiled of a lot of ruminations on the various ways we conduct ourselves down here on Earth and how we’re burning our bridges to a decent afterlife (if you believe in that sort of thing).
Anaesthesia Whores
This track’s heavily inspired by Philip K. Dick’s …Electric Sheep (with a good helping of ‘Blade Runner 2049’ in there too), but I feel like the song’s overarching theme is tangentially built upon Ian Malcolm’s “Chilean sea bass” tirade, namely the line “before you even knew what you had, you patented it and packaged it’. We’re talking about hubris, playing god and the long term effects of pain-numbing pursuits that we’re yet to discover the consequences of. Light and poppy but in drop-C… like a musical Flat White.
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Skip Town
Our producer Mike Bannard really brought Motion Sick to life in ways we’d never imagined – we can’t thank him enough. He showed us this composition that he’d penned whilst mixing the album (I believe the basis of the track is a stretched out guitar from an unused take), we loved it, thought it worked perfectly to mark the midpoint of the album, and that it was a great opportunity to prominently feature the man himself.
Present Tense
I had a moment a few years back that stuck with me, where I was able to really cut through all the mental noise for the first time in a long while. I think “Present Tense” is about trying to preserve that space, with the struggle to do so sort of framed as this juxtaposition between a revelatory trip through the desert and the confines of suburbia and small town thinking.
As we were writing it, Mark was adamant that the track shouldn’t deviate from the core chord sequence – this was such a good shout, I don’t think it’d have half the impact if we’d stuck more parts in there.
Petrichor
I’d been listening to Thundercat and Boards of Canada a lot and was trying to string together chords that weren’t typically ‘us’ – this was the result. Penned as a brief, abstract memorial to the late, great Mark Lanegan.
Nightbloom
Fractured memories of the excitement experienced in those first intimate moments you share with a new love. If the main part of the song is an attempt to put words to feelings, the outro is just the feeling – a ionate, heady, emotive maelstrom.
Cavalier Blonde
If I boil it down, this one’s a treatise on white, western machismo. To me, it sounds like a ringmaster on a bullhorn announcing all these insane sideshows – they just happen to be acts of toxic masculinity, privilege and narcissism instead of sword-swallowing and fire-eating.
Never Leave
Much of the imagery in Never Leave is based on one of my favourite films, Andrew Dominik’s revisionist Western The Assassination Of Jesse James By The Coward Robert Ford. “Never Leave” is an attempt to try to draw parallels between the idol worship, obsessive emulation and eventual sabotage and betrayal of James by Ford and the psychological concept of the inner critic, this sub-personality, often indistinguishable from the self, that in extreme cases feels like it seeks to supplant and even destroy you.”
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