“People will always find the thing they remember you from and then relate it back. But I think what I want to do is try to railroad as much of that as possible into the music where it will be useful.”
Laurence Hewson
Interview by Angela Croudace
With the world, and, more importantly, their attention spans, getting smaller almost by the day, it has become increasingly important for bands to maintain a high standard of productivity.
Gone are the days where a band would put out an album, tour on the back of it for the next two years, spend 12 to 18 months writing and recording the next one before repeating the cycle. Most people – even hardcore fans – would have like;y moved on to another band or another fad long before the first half of the touring cycle was completed.
In the modern age it’s pretty basic in the sense that if you aren’t offering the musical landscape something fresh and new every six months or so, then you may as well become a DJ.
Knowing this, Melbourne-based rock outfit Sordid Ordeal have wasted little time following up on last year’s debut album When I Left Town, releasing the first single from the next album just eight months later.
Tigress is the first sonic introduction to Sordid Ordeal’s second album Nothing Was The Same Again – which is the companion piece to When I Left Town and will be unleashed early next year.
So diverse with their sound, the term Stout Rock has been coined just to try to simplify things for the fans, but there is little need to simplify things for Sordid Ordeal any more than they already are.
What you see is what you get. And hear.
A refreshing breath of flippant fresh air in an increasingly sanitised music industry, Sordid Ordeal refuse to yield, playing music for the enjoyment rather than potential adulation. Their sound is an amalgamation of folkish story-telling and ballads with blistering, mangy rock and epic anthems. They weld together the abrasive and heavy with the gentle & intimate, creating an incendiary mix of subversion and hedonism.
See. Stout Rock.
With several live appearances in the bands near future, including a headline spot at Metal In The Mountains in Beechworth on November 30 alongside DarkHorse, Mammon’s Throne, Munitions and more, frontman Laurence, guitarist Jake and bass player Joe sat down with HEAVY for an entertaining chat about anything and everything.
We start things off in the relatively safe place of talking about the new single Tigress.
“The song is about a woman who breaks out of the expectations of conservative rule in Australia and decides to move to the city and live her own life,” Laurence explained. “She left Wagga in the 80s – it is a woman I know, but I can’t elaborate too much more on the details – but it was a direct inspiration. I drew a lot of comparison to what my journey was like. Although it wasn’t that of a woman growing up in a country with quite a problem with misogyny and chauvinism, my personal journey was breaking out of a militantly religious family and going to the city to find myself. Although there’s different versions of the message, the result is very much the same. That song falling out of me was quite an easy one to write. As for the video… not everybody gets a band full of so many good-looking roosters, so I think I just wanted to feature everyone in our video clip. The last two video clips with the previous line-up I wanted the next clip I was gonna record – although there’s gonna be a narrative aspect to it which is where the burlesque dancer comes into it – first and foremost just putting the current line-up of the band in there. I just wanted people to see this is what it is now. This is how much better it is. Look at the beard on that man over there and how good it is (laughs). There was actually a bit of a conundrum in deciding how to portray the narrative of the character that I created for this, Alistrina, because you wanna portray that liberation, that breaking out of the mould in an exciting way but if you did it in a business corporate sense, there’s not a lot to that. I think it was a matter of trying to find something that represented it in a dignified way.”
Listen/watch the full interview to get a full rundown on what Sordid Ordeal have been doing, what they should be doing, and what they plan to be doing.
