Civilian

Dropping the listener into their scalding brew, ‘Back Again’, the first cut off the Boy Kill Boy debut is a scorcher, an unforgiving, tickertape parade down Hades’ highway. It's indicative of this seething maelstrom of an album, a tour de force of infernal rhythms, muscular drums and keyboard swoon. The lyric is an almost Faustian fable, our hero bound in a perilous pact with a Devil Woman: “Can I find some more misery, if it can’t be you then it must be me”.
On ‘Suzie’ the band succeed in exposing the magical in the mundane, teasing out the poetry lurking in even the most ordinary of lives. It's an act of musical sensationalism.
However, the standout is the imperious ‘On My Own’. Here the vocal is compassionate, almost imploring, Chris Peck corralling our emotions, the guitars and drums are unforgiving, the hooks harsh, the rhythms relentless, and underpinning it all, there's the beautifully fluctuating keyboard of Peter Carr. He's a sonic Brunel, his keyboard ministrations enabling Boy Kill Boy to engineer a bridge between the scathing punk rock of The Jam and the more languid delights of synth provocateurs Soft Cell. This is a bold and resonant record. Civilian is, in short, lethal.