Review Summary: Ramblin' man
The oceans are rising, wars are raging, and a visceral discord of hatred and paranoia crackles through every day life like a live wire surge. Governments leave their weak to die or send their strong to be slaughtered. The price of human life has never felt so transactional; numbers, statistics and make-believe, indeed. Bearing all this in mind, there seems to be a movement this year, with noise rock in particular, and it feels earned and inevitable. That's right; it's the year of the rambler.
Enter KEN Mode, the maybe kinda end boss of this bug-eyed, spittle flecked, relentlessly ranting subsect. Take a song like 'Throw Your Phone in the River' for example. It employs a bass heavy mix (which the whole album does, to great effect) in which exceptionally thicc lines careen drunkenly all over the place like the inescapable hellfire of racing thoughts pinballing around the world's darkest hallway. It is pitch perfect table setting for a blistering blink-and-you-miss-it rager of cavernous drums, serrated creepy crawly guitar, and buckets of nihilistic despair. All elements are in lockstep so intrinsically it sounds like each respective component is being birthed in real-time, and that is a critical point; while similar releases sound like reports from the aftermath,
Null actively sounds like the wreckage, a transmission from the eye of the storm.
Whether it's the oscillating industrial nightmare of 'The Tie' or the more straightforward metalcore thrill of 'Desperately Searching For An Enemy', KEN Mode find a surprising amount of flexibility in how they go about this.
Null at times sounds like the same song but constantly approached from different angles; there is both a uniformity and a charged unpredictability. Frustration and rage bubble over into reams of atonal saxophone and Converge-esque riffs, or manifest in moments of unbearably tense stillness. You never know if vocals are going to be screamed, yelled or solemnly spoken. There is even the odd moment of beauty, such as the apprehensive piano hiding in the margins of bona fide epic 'Lost Grip' or a shimmering interlude placed in the otherwise churning, neck vein buldging bruiser 'Not My Fault'. It all leads to a pretty perfect conclusion, too. 'Unresponsive' is a hundred black clouds on the horizon, the air humming with electricity that manifests in scattered thunderstorms of discordant violin and a droning wave of juddering guitar. It speaks of, what else, a storm that is looming, of being forgotten and abandoned.
Null is that cataclysmic event, without release or relief, and any listener struck by its black magic won't be forgetting it anytime soon.
