OUTRIGHT: Keep You Warm | 4ZZZ Brisbane 102.1FM

- I recently heard Jelena Golunza, frontwoman for Naarm / Melbourne hardcore band OUTRIGHT talking about how great it is the band can still do its thing, after more than a decade in the business. It’s difficult! Life gets in the way: the family, the job at the bank, the failing joints. If you are able to though, the dividends can be amazing, especially for the listeners. I often marvel at just how good bands get: you got to remember, when most of them start out, they’re kids and can barely play. As tight as OUTRIGHT sound now, you’d think they’d been around for twenty years. Really though, I was listening to a demo of theirs from back in 2011 and, well, the production was rough as guts -to be honest that’s pretty appropriate for hardcore- but the playing was already amazing.

Yeah, I have to admit OUTRIGHT are good enough, I might listen to them even if the band’s politics were pretty dodgy. Yeah, judge me, but maybe you listen to such politically unsound earworms as Melvins, or … frickin’ Kate Bush, I know what you’re tacitly condoning! How fortunate, then, OUTRIGHT’s political credentials are still impeccable. Their very name is borrowed from a song by Newcastle hardcore outfit with a strong feminist streak, Arms Reach. OUTRIGHT’s own feminist streak is on proud display on Keep You Warm. Advance single The Hammer repurposes the hexenhammer, the crazed screed of dark age misoginysts and arms a new generation of witches with the ideological weaponry to go and hunt the witch hunters. “Salem’s lot / Give back what we got / Hunt you down” as Jelena screams.

I like the self-empowerment twist that OUTRIGHT put on that classic hardcore obsession with wrestling personal demons. I mean, life is tough and there’s a lot of shit to go through. I think Jelena nearly gives in on the other album advance, Burn. One-and-a-half minutes teetering on the edge of disaster: “Exhaustion / Setting in / Tough skin / Wearing thin / Bold eyes / Turning blind / Each hour / Losing my mind.” OUTRIGHT, however, are always there with an arm around the shoulder and a gentle word of encouragement … screamed in your face.

Keep You Warm takes the time to target a lot of contemporary issues. They knock down statues to colonisers on opener Truth Teller and take up the call for treaty, (that's Makarrata in the Yolngu - I learned a thing!), on Tied Through Time. Populist demagogues get a spray on Tyrants/Vultures and the sorry state of the environment is the theme of closer, a tribute to the ecological classic, Silent Spring. Actually did you know that species depopulation is a whole other issue to climate change? Human activity has wiped out around seventy percent of all vertebrate species in the last fifty years; and people wonder why we’re all angsty and listening to hardcore.

Keep You Warm is pretty expansive for a hardcore record and not just in the range of topics it takes on. Though it’s mostly content to do hardcore, really well, it’s hard to ignore the seven-and-a-half-minute prog-core monster, The Call, putting a horror-movie twist on psychological self-sabotage and lavishing it with a lumbering, enormous stoner groove; nice!

Going back to that interview I heard (it was with the Born Yesterday Sweaters Club podcast if you want to look it up), Jelena said that every time she feels like she’s too old to be in a hardcore band, or the idiocy of the music biz makes her want to get the hell out, she thinks of her fourteen-year-old self and how much every kid, but especially non-CIS-male kids need bands they can look up to as role models. I’m not fourteen any more and I know there’s people out there who’ve had to deal with a lot more crap than I have, but I too am extremely glad OUTRIGHT is still a going concern.

- Chris Cobcroft.