STACK #164 June 2018

MUSIC NEWS

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TOURING 15/6 - 7/7

HIGH TENSION INTERVIEW

A long the tar-sticky road of a metal band’s career, many of the most durable acts prize fidelity to their original sound over all else. Karina Utomo says that even with the recent additions of Lauren Hammel (drums) and Mike Deslandes (guitarist and songwriter), she always knew High Tension’s path would morph towards something more vicious. “In my mind and I think from the start of High Tension as a project, I’ve always wanted it to be in that realm of the more extreme end of the spectrum – to be really heavy, to be a brutal band,” she says. “[With new album Purge ] we definitely explored a lot of avenues, a lot of experimentation. I love how collaborative we are…

I won’t lie, [Mike] put in most of the work, so it was good to have a totally different personality in the band when it came to one of the main songwriters. I feel like writing this type of music and wanting to honour the things that we wrote… has been really good for our physical health as well.” Utomo describes Deslandes' role as “crucial” – he not only wrote songs, but also produced and engineered the album: “He comes from a background of being in bands all his life – music is his whole life. He’s recorded all of the best bands in Melbourne! His work really is prolific. But a lot of [the time] I see him really labour over the sound and the pedals, and when you ask him a

question… half the time I don’t know what he’s talking about but he’ll totally humour me, and tell me the workings of a particular pedal and how that affects the tone, or different combinations. He’s very patient.” Meanwhile, the album’s subject matter centres around the horrific anti-Communist killings in Utomo's home country of Indonesia, in 1965 – which, although not studied nearly as widely, ranks alongside the ‘30s Soviet, ‘40s Nazi and ‘50s Maoist purges as one of the worst mass murders of the 20th century. “[Music is] a really important outlet for me to be able to express these feelings and tell these stories, because there’s still present-day implications for the victims of the

anti-Communist purge,” Jakarta- born Utomo says carefully. “I’ve done self-directed research and I’m starting, on a very small scale, a little bit of an oral history project to make sure some of these stories are documented. So I think my approach comes from a more personal and reflective perspective of why it’s important to be able to speak openly about traumatic things, and about how harmful it is to silence people, and hide things, or be in denial.” ZKR

Purge by High Tension is out June 15 via Double Cross/Cooking Vinyl.

WEST THEBARTON TOURING 7/6 - 30/6

Intricate, soulful, gut-wrenching and hard as nails: Different Beings Being Different is the new album fromAdelaide rock acesWest Thebarton; we threw a series of questions about the beast to frontman "Reverend" Ray Dalfsen. Words Tim Lambert

How would you describe Different Beings Being Different to the uninitiated? Pub rock in disguise. The phrase ‘pub rock’ means a lot of things to a lot of people in Australia.What does it mean to you? Funny you should ask… some people have interpreted the term

‘pub rock’ almost as some kind of bogan holy grail of music, and associate it with VB, V8 supercars and mullet haircuts. I guess over time this has become an endearing thing and people have tried to emulate that culture, but to [us], pub rock is anything but bogan. [It's] music that is massive: huge sounds, good riffs... music that doesn’t fit into arenas, football

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JUNE 2018

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