In looking back at it now, 2011’s Venerable lived up to its name. Following rightful critical praise for that record and a grueling tour schedule to support it, KEN Mode was rewarded with a Juno for Best Metal / Hard Music Album, besting the trad-metal bozos in Anvil and underrated spazz-grinders Fuck The Facts. Since then, KEN Mode has gone international, signing a deal with French-based label Season Of Mist and filling their rotating bassist slot with American Andrew LaCour (formerly of Khann), and that brings us here, to Entrench, the band’s fifth full-length in their fourteen-year existence.
Stylistically, Entrench isn’t a marked deviation from the band’s previously established path: like Venerable and before, it’s metallic hardcore crossed with Amphetamine Reptile-styled noise rock, though it is noticeably punchier than Venerable. A large part of that distinction is due to the production – whereas Converge guitarist and metalcore producer par excellence Kurt Ballou manned the faders for Venerable, Entrench was produced by Matt Bayles (Mastodon, Norma Jean, Giant Squid). These tones are thicker, the whole thing just a bit more polished than was Venerable. The vocals sit further back in the mix, and the instruments are a bit brawnier and more sonically punishing.
Opener “Counter Culture Complex” sports a spiraling riff that runs headlong into suitably clamorous chorus chords; “Your Heartwarming Story Makes Me Sick” lays the titular admonishment as a near-chant atop a truly burly hardcore groove. Both “The Promises Of God” and “Secret Vasectomy” are built around some absolutely ripping metalcore riffs. The seven-minute “Romeo Must Never Know” shows that KEN Mode has a better grasp of how to downshift dynamics than do many of their peers, even though the repeated whisper of “But this won’t end” does begin to feel like truth after roughly the six-minute mark. The album-closing “Monomyth” does an equally good job at balancing the remainder of Entrench’s fury – haunting piano notes plunk atop a chiming clean guitar figure. A cello enters at the halfway point, and then the remainder of a string section. It’s an odd thing, an orchestral ending for an album of noisy punk-metal calamity, but it’s not as incongruous as it seems, or, more accurately, not as off-putting as that combination should be. It flows surprisingly well, winding down the album in grand fashion, even if it’s nothing like anything that came before (save the brief swirling string bit that opens “Counter Culture”).
Still, as good as Entrench is (and it is very good), I can’t help but hold greater loyalty to Venerable – there’s an intangible something more direct about it. Even as it’s less stout in production stature, that less burly attack is sharper, more concise and more… well, just better. Venerable’s songs are more fully realized, its approach equally noisy in terms of style if not in terms of volume, and its sharper tones and slightly lessened reliance upon sonic bludgeoning allows those songs to breathe more, to move more. KEN Mode is one of modern hardcore’s finest bands – they even have the Juno to prove it, if you take stock in such things – and though it falls a hair shy of its predecessor, Entrench is further proof of why.
