KarnivoolKarnivool are no longer just Perth's leading prog rock light. Nor are they Australia's. Since the release of their widely acclaimed second record, 2009's Sound Awake, the five-piece have truly become a global entity on the touring circuit. Drum Media catches frontman Ian Kenny arriving at Hurricane Festival in the northern Germany municipality of Scheeßel, where the band are due to perform later that evening on a bill that offers everything from Of Monsters & Men to Parkway Drive. The frontman is excited about the show, admitting that the band have long enjoyed a positive reception from hard rock-hungry Europeans, but seems unaffected by the pressures of trumping their current worldwide standing with their soon-to-be-released third album, Asymmetry.
“Well, we'll see,” he slowly begins. “We'll see how this record sits with Karnivool fans and we'll see where it goes outside that. Karnivool has a good thing happening in Europe, we've got a great thing happening in Australia, so we're going to keep focusing on those two territories and get back to the States... I dunno, we'll have to see. It's kinda too early to tell – we've just put [the album] to bed a few weeks ago so I don't really have any scope on the record yet until it gets out there and does what it does.”
First listens to Asymmetry reveal a band that are venturing to the edges of what's considered their 'sound'. Things are abrasive in parts, especially early in the record, Karnivool offering arguably more sonic aggression than they ever have before. But, those musical explosions are evened out by songs that are raw and revealed, the band left as exposed as they've ever been.
“This third record was just about exploration through Karnivool and a bit more experimenting with the band and seeing what we have in us and what's in the track,” Kenny explains. “I think this record, there's more band on it; we've left a lot of the performances in there, so it's not so heavily relying on production which maybe makes it a little more raw than the last two. But we're just pushing it and seeing what else we've got to say musically, and that's what we'll continue to do I think. That's what's exciting about Karnivool.
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“[We] doesn't really want linear records,” the vocalist continues. “We try and create records that read a bit more like a novel, because you want to be taken somewhere when you're part of the listening journey, so you want it to lure you in then sit you down, then it picks you up, smacks you across the head, and it pulls you into another room and gives you a different treatment. You want, you need movement in a record; it needs to take you somewhere and make you feel.
“It was a pretty open and free space when we were recording – anything goes really,” Kenny expands further. “It wasn't an easy record to make, it was a pretty demanding record, just due to the nature of what's happening [in the music]. But the space we recorded in in Byron Bay, it was one of the best recording environments/experiences Karnivool [have] had. By no means was it chilled out, but it was cool and focused and just a fucking really nice place to make a record.”
After putting the initial coat on the raw ideas in their home studio in Perth over a two-year period, the band decamped to the Northern Rivers region of the east coast, settling into a routine that balanced time in the ocean and the cafe culture cruise with locked down sessions with acclaimed producer Nick DiDia (Rage Against The Machine, Powderfinger). And again, like Sound Awake, nothing about the process was instantaneous or immediately gratifying. A second four-year wait time for fans which begs the question: could this band function in the same way if there were only a couple of years between releases?
“You know what, I think we'd like to do it another way,” Kenny admits straight-up, “but we haven't discovered a way to do it any quicker because when we're writing the parts which become pieces of music, they just need a bit of gestation time. We need to sit with them and work on them, which is part of the reason why it takes so long to get these records up to scratch. I think we're just starting to get a handle on our songwriting as a band, so maybe we'll be able to deliver the next record quicker, but at this point I can't say, I have no idea.”
Pulling the frontman back to his earlier comment: “It wasn't an easy record to make”, Kenny discusses what Karnivool were battling with during the making of Asymmetry, but also reveals that those tough times do hold their own artistic rewards.
“Basically, in preproduction we had most of the arrangements down, and I guess there was like that twenty per cent on a handful of songs that just wasn't finished. So just ironing out those things in the studio can add a bit of pressure, y'know, studio dollars and studio hours and you're sitting there working away then you've got to make calls on things. It's a double-edged sword because sometimes you can just sit there and fucking deliberate for ages on a certain part because you know you have the time, but if you realise you don't then it forces you to make a call. That just got a bit tense, so there was a bit of a struggle there to finish a few of the pieces, but I think it was a good thing because I think you can hear a bit of a struggle on the record and that's what you want to hear, you want to hear exactly what was happening – it makes it a bit more real.”
Karnivool put a lot of thought into track placement too, allowing the sonic light and shade that encompasses the record to really shine through. “We just arranged them in a flow that we thought made sense,” Kenny reasons, agreeing that with a great deal of progressive rock, the listening experience lives and dies by the journey created. “Yeah, absolutely. We did put a bit of thought into it, and as long as it makes sense... I guess the most important thing about album flow is to do your best with the narrative of the record from song to song, and if you get to a point where it keeps flowing then it works, man.”
But even with the aforementioned studio stress, the obvious fan anticipation and other outside pressures aren't held in high regard by the band. Karnivool run against their own clock and will continue to do so, even if it ticks over at a slower rate than most. “I think the only pressure that comes is internally from the band when we are writing,” Kenny finishes, “what we expect from each other and what we expect from the band. All we're trying to do is just write music that we hold as the highest above anything, so there's a lot of pressure there just to get it as good as we can and get it right – that's the only pressure that really comes into play.”
