Review Summary: Built on solid foundations, but ultimately a mess of disjointed ideas stuck together with a total lack of finesse.
As it's title might not-so-subtly suggest, dissonance is the foundation of Karnivool's 2013 album
Asymmetry. It's a musical concept that has been around, quite probably, for as long as music itself has. Dissonance has been used by classical players and jazz players and pretty much every genre of contemporary music imaginable for it's many rather fascinating applications; to build tension. To release tension. To unsettle. To intensify. It's amazing what a little controlled lack of musicality can do to a song, and, indeed, whole genres have been constructed around the concept - although, to what degree of success is up to the listener.
So building an album around the idea of dissonance doesn't seem such a ridiculous notion, particularly within the confines of Karnivool's chosen genre of progressive rock, where the goal is to stretch boundaries and test the listener. Certainly, given the four year waiting period between
Asymmetry and it's predecessors - the rather lovely, melody-centric
Sound Awake and equally polished
Themata, it might seem a bit redundant to not explore these ideas somewhat. Another more melodious release might be damned to go down in history with the “Just another Karnivool album” label.
Thus it's quite plain what
Asymmetry was trying to be, but unfortunately it's clear from the get-go that Karnivool have not pulled off this trick with much grace.
Asymmetry is, before labelling it as 'good music' or 'bad music,' simply something of a mess, a constant battle between good ideas and terrible delivery. There are some damned well-written songs in the mix; “Aeons” is the immediate stand-out, creeping into life with a lurching bass line and vocalist Ian Kenny's wary delivery before the guitars come crashing in for a series of intense melodic climaxes in typical Karnivool fashion. Tracks like this and lead single “We Are” succeed because they display a perfect contrast between the aforementioned disquieting, almost unnatural atmosphere and Karnivool's trademark melodic sensibilities.
And contrast is exactly what the majority of this album is missing. The thing with dissonance is that it only works within the context of melody; without melody dissonance is just noise, and this is where songs like “A.M. War” and “The Last Few” trip over themselves. Karnivool throw every trick in the book into the mix to make these tracks as jarring as possible, every minute a bubbling broth of rumbling guitars or screeching leads, of incessant snare drum pounding and thick wobbly bass with no real structure or discernible destination. And yes, it may be intentional, it may be 'supposed' to sound like that, but that doesn't change the fact that it sounds pretty flat-out bad, and lacks any sense of finesse or subtlety. Of course, the whole album doesn't fall this far into being a total mess – most songs try to walk the same tightrope “Aeons” and “We Are” do by balancing melody and atonality but tend to just come across as a messy collage of ideas, bits and pieces that the band didn't glue together properly because "it'll sound cooler this way." Elsewhere, “Sky Machine” tries to take off into the heavens without ever gaining more momentum than a light jogging pace; although it undeniably does serve as an album highlight, as does the surprisingly elegant and graceful “Float.”
Hindering this album's delivery even further is it's abysmal production; again, also presumably an intentional trick by the band to add further to the already overdone 'asymmetry' concept. It's worked for other bands, but to cut a long story short, it doesn't work here, mostly because adding rough, jarring production to a piece of music when your whole band is already trying to sound as discomposed and atonal as possible is kind of akin to throwing a handful of *** into a slurry pit and then proclaiming “Man, now it
really smells!”
All things considered,
Asymmetry does present some good ideas, and yields a few worthwhile results, but ultimately it's a concept that is weighed down by it's own graceless delivery, the sound of an idea that has been pushed so hard into existence that it emerges in such an ungainly manner that it borders on self-parody. The good songs still stand strong on their own as excellent Karnivool tracks, but as a whole, this is not an album most will want to swallow repeatedly.
