The album favours a dance style with electronic instruments and studio effects, such as programmed drums and synthesisers, and features an eclectic array of material including art rock songs and love ballads.

[7] When playing London's Wembley Arena on the One for All tour, the group had truncated their Saturday Night Fever songs into a reluctant medley, undercutting them with jokes about falsetto, but were visibly taken aback by the positive audience reaction.

[7] The members of the Bee Gees – brothers Barry, Robin and Maurice Gibb – produced the album themselves and worked on it in their Miami Beach-based Middle Ear Studios for almost a year,[2][9] primarily recording it between August and December 1990.

[9] Like its predecessors, High Civilization was recorded with a small group of musicians, namely guitarist Alan Kendall and bassist George "Chocolate" Perry – both of whom had played with the band before – as well as keyboardist and programmer Tim Moore and percussionist Lenny Castro.

[19] Fellow journalist Dave Larsen believed that, to achieve a contemporary sound, the Bee Gees used beats reminiscent of Bobby Brown ("Dimensions") and Mariah Carey ("Human Sacrifice").

[13] The album's title track is an art rock song,[7][16][22] defined by what reviewer Dean Lynn Ford calls a "cluttered, clanking and highly cerebral" sound that evokes construction workers "building a brink-of-Armageddon ladder to heaven",[20] as well as a jerky chorus melody that Stanley compares to mid-1980s Level 42.

[14] Barry's melodic love ballad "Happy Ever After" features an unusual structure, multi-part melody, understated guitar work,[19][22][13] and vocals that soar above its "hypnotic interplay of synthesizer rhythm, bass and percussion".

[24] Stanley deems it a "wild grab bag" that defines the album, noting the "nervous energy" of its intro and the chorus' mix of Barry's fast phrasing, Robin's upper register vocals and the group's combined harmonies.

He also highlights its especially complicated structure, and the psychedelic outro featuring "sound effects of a children's playground, a military drum loop and then an abrupt end with a door slamming and Barry defiantly shouting, 'Right!'.

[13] Considered a strong example of the group's harmonic sense,[24] "Human Sacrifice" is a funk song influenced by hip hop,[19][20] with cryptic lyrics that possibly hint at a sexual encounter,[20] and vocals that are buried in the mix beneath its danceable rhythm track.

[13][2] Released in May, the second single "When He's Gone" was unsuccessful on the charts, despite its sleeve featuring what biographers Melinda Bileyu, Hector Cook and Andrew Môn Hughes describe as "a great picture of Maurice with his hands crossed over his face".

The third single, "The Only Love", featured a sleeve depicting Maurice's daughter Samantha; released in August only in certain regions, it was similarly unsuccessful, although Barry's fondness for it led to it him performing it solo on the accompanying European tour, in a spot typically reserved for "Words".

Elsewhere on the tour, "Words" received a five-minute standing ovation in Frankfurt, while during the first of five open-air concerts in Saarbrücken, a power cut disrupted Robin's performance of "Juliet", although the crowd finished the song for him.

[33] Three shows at Berlin's Waldbühne venue were filmed for an hour-long TV special and limited edition VHS release; notably, Barry wore different fingerless cycling gloves at each concert to protect his arthritic fingers.

[35] The tour was scheduled to end with English shows at the National Exhibition Centre in Birmingham on 6 July, and at London's Wembley Arena the following evening; the latter was broadcast live on BBC Radio 1.

[35] In contrast to their 1989 show at the arena, the Bee Gees now performed "Night Fever" and "Stayin' Alive" in full, with "no apologies, no embarrassment"; Stanley comments: "The balance between past, present and future more closely aligned.

"[36] To ease demand for further shows, the Bee Gees played an additional date in Birmingham, finishing the tour, and the brothers went on a break,[35] during which, Barry then made a cameo appearance in the Only Fools and Horses special "Miami Twice".

[36] Deborah Wilker, reviewing High Civilization for the South Florida Sun Sentinel, called it a diverse, pleasant album which should both encourage positive perceptions of the Bee Gees and "find an audience with loyal fans".

[19] Harry Fisher, for The Morning Call, believed the album to be "good, even if it could have been better", writing that despite their age, the group "still sound inspired" and continue to "combine eloquent, three-part harmonies with solid songwriting".

She comments that their "falsettos, harmonies and victim-of-love themes" remained, but not the "tender emotion" typical of their work, as it "drowns in the cold synths and harsh drum machines that further stunt this album's already questionable potential.

He criticised its similarities to Yes, calling the title track "the worst of art rock", and describes the album's music as having "a sterile, antiseptic feel of musicians who spend too much time with machines.

[44] In the Dayton Daily News, Larsen believed young audiences would be put off by the group's high-pitched singing, writing that "High Civilization makes it painfully clear that you can't keep a bad sound down.

[45] In 1997, Timothy White of Billboard commented that although it was the Bee Gees' "most unremarked album" in the US, its "resourceful production sowed the seeds of both the jungle and drum'n'bass techniques only now entering the pop mainstream.

"[25] Hughes also commented that both High Civilization and its follow-up Size Isn't Everything (1993) "explored a myriad of different sounds compared to their predecessors", and were successful in the UK and Europe but overlooked in North America.