Back on
June 15th, 2018, the ears of the world were given the gift
of Purge from the band High Tension. The band hails from
Melbourne, Australia and are one of the greatest discoveries that
I've ever made while diving in the immense ocean of tunes that is
Bandcamp.
After
the let down that was the bill of opening acts for Code Orange, Purge
was the blistering and bruising punch in the earhole that I
needed to remind me of what heavy music could be. Due to the
Melbourne/Pittsburgh time difference, I received the email
notification that the album download was available late in the
evening on the night before the official release. I immediately ran
to my computer to jam high-res audio files onto my hard drive. For
two straight listens, at a volume that probably took years off my
life, I sat in the middle of the floor and watched my speakers, as if
something visual was going to happen. I was stunned.
Purge
is a 34 minute piece of empirical evidence that High Tension is
clearly not fucking around. After their first two albums, Death
Beat and Bully, drummer Damian Coward and guitarist Ash
Pegram departed. This left vocalist Karina Utomo and bass player
Matt Weston as the only original members. Lauren Hammel and Mike
Deslandes stepped in on drums and guitar, respectively. Sometimes
after a band goes through line-up changes, they either end up
sounding as if they lost a step or they stick to their guns and make
the same record twice because they don't want to leave their comfort
zone until everyone figures out where they fit in. That is not the
case with Purge. If High Tension saw the bar set by their
previous albums as a tall building, they leapt over it in a single
bound.
Karina
Utomo's vocal approach is one that gives me the impression that I
would not want to encounter her in a dark alley. She can bring the
savagery with the best of them and would certainly qualify to be
credited in the liner notes as “Throat,” much like HR, from the
the Bad Brains.
Lyrically,
Utomo is drawing from the purges of the mid-1960s that occurred in
Indonesia. This happened under General Muhammed Suharto who was the
dictator of the country until 1998. Much like the purges in Cambodia
under Pol Pot, artists and musicians were swept up and murdered with
their works becoming contraband. This had a negative cultural impact
on these countries that can still be felt today. Listening to the
rock and roll that was coming from these countries just before the
purges is not easy given the knowledge that shortly after it was
recorded all of the musicians were most likely rounded up and erased
from existence.
There
is only one sonic lull on the album, it's track 5, titled
“Surrender.” The velocity of the music may have subsided for
five minutes but the intensity and poetics of the lyrics that are
sung more than make up for it. “Hold on/To the fury in your
voices/Hold on/To the sorrow in your pulse/Drag the sword from your
back.” Things don't get much better than that. On more than one
occasion, I've found myself sitting quietly and reading the lyric
sheet that came with the vinyl. They are that good.
The
only downside seems to be the lack of North American distribution. The shipping costs from Australia were almost as much as the LP but
so incredibly worth it. The color breakdown, as far as I could tell,
is 100 on oxblood/bone swirl, 300 on oxblood/gold
swirl and 300 on straight oxblood. The oxblood/gold swirl looks like it's only available from
the High Tension Bandcamp page.
If
you're going to get the vinyl, I wouldn't wait too long. High
Tension's vinyl tends to dry up relatively fast from their
webstore/label. Currently, there are a few copies of Bully
on Discogs which was on pink vinyl. Since the initial run of 500, on clear vinyl, sold out, Death
Beat only popped up for
sale once on Discogs a few weeks ago. And that copy now resides on
my shelf which, coincidently, was delivered on the same day that
Purge
crash landed on my porch. My turntable has been black and blue and sweating profusely for the past few weeks.
Here
are a few links and videos for the curious:
No comments:
Post a Comment