Still making noise

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This article was published 19/09/2024 (741 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

KEN Mode founding members Jesse and Shane Matthewson didn’t know as kids that they’d grow up to become lifelong purveyors of dissonant, thrashing and brooding noise rock, but in retrospect, there were a few early hints.

“The types of toys we were drawn to as kids were always the more f—ed up ones,” says guitarist Jesse Matthewson, 41.

“I always chose the bad guys. He-Man always won, so to me, they were more interesting-looking. I guess darker versions of art and darker aspects of life were just more attractive. I don’t understand why. Maybe that’s a mental-illness thing. I don’t know.”

As adolescents only beginning to seek out order amid perceived unfairness, cruelty and chaos, the Matthewsons listened to In Utero, with Nirvana’s 1993 album — produced by Steve Albini — serving as a gateway to heavier reflections on a shattered world.

After Nirvana frontman Kurt Cobain’s death, they began playing together in 1995 as the Bedlamites, later considering calling themselves the Mighty Bombula before arriving at KEN Mode — inspired by Henry Rollins’ “Kill Everyone Now” mantra — around 1998.

While classmates flipped through required reading, between hockey practices, the brothers devoured Come As You Are, the Nirvana biography by music journalist Michael Azerrad, buying CDs by every grunge, post-hardcore and noise-rock group the author or his interviewees even mentioned in passing: the Melvins, Black Flag, Scratch Acid and Big Black.

“The type of music got more and more antisocial the more I dug, and I was basically screwed from 13 on. I could no longer relate to regular kids,” Jesse Matthewson says.

That “failure” to fit into the circles of predictable behaviour became the source of the brothers’ ultimate musical shape, one defined by jagged edges and purposeful changes in direction.

For 25 years, across nine full-length albums, KEN Mode has been excavating its own psyche, earning local, national and international acclaim for refusing to beautify its sound while further clarifying its initial worldview — that the darkness isn’t quite so troublesome as pretending it doesn’t exist, whether you’re sitting solo on a doomed school bus at 17 or staring down the barrel of aggrieved middle-aged disintegration on the other side of 40.

But longevity alone isn’t necessarily a reason to celebrate. As KEN Mode — currently composed of the Matthewsons, bassist Skot Hamilton and since 2017, the multi-talented saxophonist Kathryn Kerr — enters its second quarter century, the band is still discovering itself, hitting an unexpected stride as “regular” listeners begin to key in on several of the anxieties that drove the Matthewsons to first hit record.

With a rotating cast of players, there have been several international tours, including a stretch, around the release of 2011’s Venerable, of what was essentially a year on the road. Though its members have a jocular attitude toward awards recognition and mainstream acclaim, for Venerable, the band won the inaugural metal/hard music album of the year at The Junos, also earning honours from the Western Canadian Music Awards. On 2015’s followup, Success, the band worked with Albini himself.

For their latest album, 2023’s Polaris Prize-longlisted Void, KEN Mode sunk into the bleakest depths of the conditions of its creation, acknowledging the viral elephant floating through the swollen air in every isolated echo chamber. A pained, impassioned and challenging record, Void was well-received by critics and fans at various levels of KEN Mode familiarity.

It’s music the brothers — who are also accountants, specializing in artist finances — consider a new creative peak, giving tons of credit to Hamilton and to Kerr, who also plays keys and synth, for introducing new approaches and ideas to what could at this point have become a perfunctory musical entity.

“The fact that we’ve been able to pull this off, still keep doing this, have experiences like this is kind of crazy,” says Shane Matthewson. “That some of the stuff we’re doing right now is the best it’s ever been — 25 years deep — is kind of crazy.”

So, how about KEN Mode at 50?

“Someone recently was talking to me about how there’s plenty of heavy bands that can continue into old age, and I was like, ‘Not drummers!’ They wear out,” says Shane.

“How many more years do you guys have?” asks Kerr.

“At least two,” Jesse laughs.

In reality, the band has no plans to slow down, heading on a fall tour with Chicago industrial group Hide after playing a 25th anniversary show Saturday at the Handsome Daughter. After that, KEN Mode hopes to get back in the studio next year.

ben.waldman@winnipegfreepress.com