High TensionDeath Beat is Aussie punk like you've never heard it. The anticipated first album from Melbourne-based four-piece High Tension rips shreds right off you; the full-length brought to us by bodies featured in esteemed acts The Nation Blue and formerly Young & Restless. It's a collaborative effort that combines back-end muscle with frontline unpredictability, and the results are explosive. The band recorded with Tom Larkin at his HQ, The Studios In The City, the same place Bodyjar cut their latest record, Role Model, “And [they] fucking drank my beers!” Karina Utomo cries. “So I ate their Le Snaks.” But aside from in-house consumable tit-for-tat the sessions moved forward with no-frills efficiency. The boys - Matt Weston (bass), Dan McKay (drums), Ash Pegram (guitar) - recorded all their instrumental parts prior to Utomo rolling in. The frontwoman then tore through with her own handheld mic, the whole process taking roughly two weeks. “I think the most important part was just not to labour over that shit,” Utomo suggests. “If you're a perfectionist… well, you can't be a perfectionist when you play in a punk band. You're capturing a moment, and you just have to not look at it too harshly and too closely, because you'll just never be happy. When you labour over something too much you're being a bit hard on yourself and you'll have too many expectations of the moment. “But I'm excited because there's songs on there that I find hilarious and I want some people to hear some of the funny songs! That's a really bad way of putting it: 'Hey, we've got an album, it's fucking funny!' [But] Collingwood, for instance - I guess you can't hear the lyrics that well - but some of the lyrics, to me they're quite funny. But I also laugh at my own jokes. And I'm barking in a bit [on the record] and it's like, 'Man, it's so good that I get to get away with this shit.' It's fun to be in a band like this, I'm happy about that.” Utomo's build isn't really in the standard hardcore vocalist mould, though; she's a damn sight slimmer and more diminutive that some of the husky forms you see fronting most acts. It means that lengthy vocal sessions in the studio can finish rather uncomfortably. “With my voice, I always use it from the stomach and it's more of a physical thing - I feel like I have to work a little bit harder. And [my muscles] can be really sore, but we [worked] around it.” How so? “I drank a lot of beer - a lot of beer,” she levels. “Luckily Matt Weston is my neighbour so he'd be the designated driver and give me a lift home after my vocal takes. When we were recording, that was the routine, I'd have a six-pack or Matt would go and get one for me so we could get the vocals done; that's probably why I sound really wasted in most of the songs.”
