Despite an enviable and increasingly excellent back catalogue, wilderness-dwelling titans KEN mode have somehow failed to make a real dent in semi-popular consciousness. Bit of a crime, really, but with newie ‘Venerable’ coming to us via fringe-metal label Profound Lore their unsung outsider status is hopefully set to change, and rightly so since it’s such a goddamn beast of a record. For the most part they’re continuing to plough the same degenerate furrow, metallised Keelhaul / Kiss It Goodbye exhortations colliding head-on with bruisingly ugly Cherubs-style noise-rock to form a twisted car wreck of sound through which weave needling Circus Lupus guitar lines and rasping, bestial grumbles. Rather than paying lip-service to such oft-dropped muso mutterings as ‘progression’ or ‘evolution’ the band have instead focused on distilling their muscular sound down to its purest form, each song carefully-crafted yet blunt and purposeful as a battering ram designed to smash a rubble-strewn path through life’s myriad frustrations and disappointments.
