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| Band Photo by Brenda Faris, courtesy of Seasons of Mist |
With a
hefty touring schedule ahead of them and a new album right around the corner,
KEN Mode made a stop through Paris last month to headline the first day of this
year’s OTB Fest alongside Celeste and to promote their upcoming full length
effort Success, with this current
date marking the albums’ (pre)release party. I sat down with the Matthewson
brothers Jesse (Guitar/Vocals) and Shane (Drums) to discuss their upcoming
album (amongst other things).
So this is the 2nd installment of your European
tour, right? Last month you were also in Europe.
Jesse: Yes, we seem to be coming over a ridiculous
amount lately (giggle). We'll be here in the fall too.
You've also played a set at Roadburn this year.
How did that go?
Jesse: It was cool, it went over pretty well. We were
definitely a little bit of an oddball thrown in there, since what they like to
focus on is more "doomy" stuff I guess? But it was fun, I'm glad we
did it.
So this current date marks the pre-release
party for your newest album Success.
First off, how would you describe the sound of this upcoming album?
Jesse: For the most part I'd say that a lot of the
metal and hardcore influences of our previous records have kind of been
stripped away and what you're left with is a much more Rock n' Roll/Noise Rock
kind of approach to the way we write music. The songwriting is a lot more
stripped-down and it just focuses a lot more on the roots of the types of bands
that made us want to start playing music in the first place when we were
teenagers.
Was the shift towards a more Noise Rock-oriented
sound a conscious move?
Jesse: I think it came naturally, maybe to
a certain extent through a bit of an exhaustion of dealing with trying to fit
into the metal and hardcore scenes. We've never really fit in anywhere. We did
a lot of touring for Entrenched; we
were out on the road for 10 out of 12 months from the time that album came out,
from march to march. It was very exhausting being the square peg trying to fit
into the round hole.
With this album you've also had a chance to
work with the legendary producer Steve Albini.
Jesse: Yeah, he engineered it. He sat in on the
mastering and helped Bob Weston master it, who's actually a bandmate of his in
Shellac too. So yeah, we did it with Steve Albini in Winnipeg, Manitoba, our
home town.
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| Steve Albini |
Were there any changes with the recording
process this time around? I understand Steve likes to record some stuff live.
Jesse: Yeah, for the most part he prefers all of the
instruments to be done live and that's how we did it. It was the first time
we've ever really done it that way. Usually, with a lot of engineers, they'll
have you do the drums first and the guitars will play along but typically you
won't actually track those. You usually do the guitars properly after you have
the bed tracks of the drums. With Steve he just sets everyone up so that it's
as isolated as it can be and you all play at once... like a live band, go figure.
Was it the noise-rock driven songs you had
written that led you to work with Steve Albini or was it the idea of working
with him that reinforced the noise-rock aspect of your sound?
Shane: Well we had already written a bunch of the
songs before we decided to record with him, so it was already going in that
direction. We could've done it with other engineers and it would've still
sounded good but I think it was the perfect combination of the songs and the
engineer that made it sound the way it did.
Jesse: If Steve would've done the previous record,
who knows if it would've sounded quite as good. It was a little bit more metal
and hardcore, some of the songs were faster.. I'm just not sure the feeling of
it would've translated as well, but for this record it translated very well.
I know you like to keep your lyrics open to a
certain degree of interpretation, but could you maybe touch upon what the album
is about?
Jesse: I consider it our first actual concept album.
It revolves around the various concepts of success, especially the modern
western, "traditional" concept of it and how insanely relative that
term is. There's a lot of poking fun at it and what people think it should be
and where we, as individuals, fit in to the universe as a grand scheme and how
ridiculous THAT all is too. That's kind of where this album jumps all over.
Shane: We also did joke about how funny it would be
if we had an album called "Success" that was just a miserable failure
(laugh), like if it didn't do well at all but it was called
"Success". We thought that that was really funny. That wasn't the
only reason why we picked the name, but we did think that it would be a funny
joke if the album did really poorly (laugh)
So either way, you're the happy whether the
album does well or not? (laugh)
Shane: Yeah. If it does really well, we look like
geniuses and if it doesn't we just look like we're jerks again...
Jesse: ... which is nothing new (laughs)
I also understand that this album has a
different lyrical approach compared to the previous albums.
Jesse: Yeah, that’s' actually one of the bigger
changes. Historically, the lyrics have been very personal to me; things that
make me feel strongly about something. With this album, a lot of the songs were
written in a format where I take notes all the time. A lot of the time it’s
ridiculous phrases or word combinations that I think are funny, a lot of it is
mean things HE says (points at Shane, laughing) or that our new bassist Scott
says. I'll be writing these things down and I have this journal of ridiculous
phrases, and a lot of the songs on this record were pieced together from those
ridiculous phrases. I managed to string all of those things together with a
general concept, so that it actually has a cohesive idea behind each song. But
it's very much like this litany of inside jokes and black comedy, pushing the
envelope further from the meaner, more sarcastic tones we've had in the past.
This is way out of left field for us, but it was a lot of fun to write. I also
do a lot more rhyming on this album. I was kind of making a conscious approach
of making these songs a little catchier. Rhyming schemes tend to make
everything catchier but I didn't want to do it in a dumb, cliché,
"pop" way, because a lot of that is 4th grade rhyming. So I like to
think that this is a little bit higher than that. Well...
Shane: 5th grade.
Jesse: Yeah, 5th grade ! (laughs)
Could you give us some insight as to where the
amazing song titles from your new album come from?
- Blessed
Jesse:
"Blessed" is kind of hitting the nail on the head. The whole song
itself is kind of about how we don't really feel like we fit in or belong
anywhere in the music industry. It's kind of sarcastic in that... we're
"Blessed"! (giggle). We
also sometimes feel like the fact that anyone pays attention to us at all is
funny in itself. We've been through so many years of nobody giving a crap, so that'
kind of what that song is all about.
- These Tight Jeans
Jesse:(Laugh) Oh
god. That was just another one of those phrases that I wrote down that I
thought was funny. I don't even know where I even came up with that (laugh).
When I told my bandmates "this is what I'm calling the song!",
everyone just let out a big sigh and were like "why???" (laugh).
Basically THAT is why! (laugh).
- The Owl...
Jesse: The Owl was part of a title of a play where
the term "Cuckold" came from (The Owl and the Nightingale, which is
actually a poem).
Shane: Jeeesus Christ.
Jesse: Yeah, and the whole song is a lot about the
gray areas in life.
Shane: …A cuckold play??
Jesse: (laugh) Yeah it's where the term originated. I
didn’t want to hit the nail right on the head with that one so I made it just "The
Owl..." with the ellipses.
- I just liked Fire
Jesse: I just liked fire actually came from a friend
of ours in Winnipeg named Alex who was talking about how he used to like to
light fires when he was a child, because he just liked fire (choking with
laughter). I thought that was really funny, and I ended up spitting it into a
song about something else. (Catching his breath).
So it's not a song about your friend who just
liked fire.
Jesse: No, it's more of a really perverse
passion-filled song. I just took the spin of "I just liked fire" and
applied it to that, and I thought it was funny. But yeah, the actual origin of
it was more litteral (bursting out laughing).
Shane: A LITTERAL child who LITTERALY was a
pyromaniac. (laughs)
- Management control
Jesse: I think it
stemmed from a Matthewson family dinner, where we were talking about something to
do with management controls...
Shane: Oh you mean like a financial system control?
Jesse: Yeah, the term "management control"
came up and I was like "that's a really cool name for a song!"
Shane: Huh, I don't remember that being said.
Jesse: I ended up applying it to a song that’s' just
about life in general.
Shane (Laughing): That's going to be the answer to every one of
these: "eeh, I took this, and it's basically about life."
(Everyone bursts out laughing)
- A Passive disaster
Jesse: The title
originally was kind of the concept of what we felt our lives were at when we
were touring for 10 months out of the 12 month year. That's kind of what our
lives felt like. Not like an active disaster, but a passive one (laugh), even
though we were in control. But things just move very quickly. The song itself
deals with experiencing the beautiful scenery in life, taking a second to stop
and experience it... while also having a sociopath breakdown (laugh).
- Failing at fun since 1981
Jesse: That's
autobiographical, in that everytime I try to have fun I end up screwing it up
somehow (laugh).
So I'm assuming it's referring to your year of
birth?
Jesse (chuckling): Yeah.
- A catalog of small disappointments
Jesse: That one is a fun one. It was on a small
article about Kepler and his love life. There was a line in it that was referring
to the process with which he was trying to pick a second wife, and it was
"a catalog of small disappointments". The entire song is about that,
and how he could've broken it down into a mathematicians' formula that ended up
becoming the Secretary Problem (Note: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Secretary_problem ), only applied to his love life. I
just thought that the whole thing was really funny and it tied in with the
concept of peoples' perception of love, marriage... and how that fits into the
way of how a successful life is supposed to be.
Shane: Kepler was a physicist, right?
Jesse: Yeah.
Shane: So it's a physicist who's trying to
mathematically break down how to choose a wife.
Jesse: Yeah.
Shane: So it was an article on that, and he was
describing the process of choosing a partner as a "catalog of small
disappointments" (everyone laughs). It was just this insane look at a mathematician
trying to take objectivity out of something that is a very personal. It was
just ridiculous.
Jesse: As soon as we'd read that article we were like
: "this HAS to be a song!"
- Dead actors
Jesse: Again, it's one of those bleak yet optimistic
outlooks on existing as a conscious being in the universe. It's about how we're
both completely unimportant yet at the same time to those around us we're
completely relevant and important in every way. I think I came up with the
title around the time Robin Williams died.
Shane: Everybody just lost their minds because they
all grew up watching movies that he was in.
Jesse: Yeah, he was like THE actor in every freakin'
family movie for that age group. It was an interesting spin on what that song
was about so I felt that it tied in well.
Shane: That was a weird thing to see though. So many
people were basically saying things like : "huh, my childhood killed
itself". Goddamn it!
Did you come up with the phrases and song
titles roughly around the same time period or did you draw from some older stuff
in your journal of phrases?
Jesse: Most of the song titles and lyrics are from
the past year and a half. I actually constructed all of the lyrics into
"song format" from April through august of last year, so it was a
pretty condensed period that we put all of the songs together in.
Could you explain how
the album art ties in with the seemingly contradictory album title?
Jesse: The album cover itself was really the only
overtly miserable picture in the panels that made it up. Our good friend Randy
Ortiz did all of the artwork (http://damnthedesign.com/ ). He was very much a part of the actual
building of the concept for the album from the ground up. He's actually done a
lot of work for us since about 2007, so it's been a long time coming for him to
do a proper commercial release for us.
Most of the
panels draw from the concept behind the actual words for the album. It's taking
western concepts of success and putting it through the viewers' filter. The
pictures could either be something that you're striving towards or that makes
your horribly depressed. A lot of the people who've been looking at the actual
panels have been saying that this album is really depressing. Like one of the
panels is a guy mowing his lawn, in shorts and sandals with socks. Another one
is a woman looking into an empty crib, holding her stomach and you don't know
whether she's lost a baby, if she's expecting a baby... it all depends on how
you want to look at it. Most of the people that we know that have seen it
immediately go to the BUMMER. The back panel is this couple at a table, the guy
is looking at some bills and the woman is looking out the window. You can
either say to yourself: "aaaw, that's a couple!" or you could go
"Goddamn it, that makes me wanna kill myself. I never want to get married.
What life is this?" (Shane laughs).
So I read that you quit your jobs a couple of
years ago. What got you to make such a decision, considering that you've said
yourself that album sales don't bring in that much money?
Jesse: (laugh) We just never wanted to look back and
say "what if?"
Shane: If you want to make a go of it, doing
anything, you need to focus all of your time on it. You can't just get up and
leave any job for 3 months at a time. We both went to university; we had professional
jobs, so we needed to "pick a street". If we had other types of jobs
we might have been able to do both at the same time, but in the fields that we
were in, it wasn't possible. So we figured we'll take the next couple of years
and see how it goes ... if not, there's always office work! That never goes
away!
So that was basically why. It wasn't so much like "we're going out into
the music world, we're gonna be huge stars now!” It's just that if you're gonna
try to do this as best as you can, you've gotta commit all of your time to it,
or else you'll never know!
What's the coolest thing about Canada?
Shane: Hockey! (Jesse laughs) ... no, the mountains!
The Rocky Mountains! Those are cool!
Jesse: Nature
too, just nature in general.
Shane: Yeah, but the Rocky Mountains are pretty
intense, particularly the Canadian Rockies are really, really huge. A lot of
people come to Europe and Switzerland to go skiing in the Alps but the Canadian
Rockies could go toe-to-toe with any mountain range in the world.
Jesse (proud): The Alps are shrinking and the Rockies keep
getting bigger also...
Shane: ... It happens very slowly though (laughs).
It's shrinking like a centimeter a year. But yeah, if I had to pick one great
thing about Canada I’d say the Rockies. Number 2 is Hockey!
Jesse: (Laugh) oh god...
Shane: ... but nobody gives a shit about hockey...
other than Canadians!
It's even on your
dollar bills, right?
Jesse: Yeah!
Shane: Yeah well there was a hockey scene on the 5
dollar bill for a while and I think they changed it now
Jesse: Yeah I think they might have changed it to a
space satellite or something.
Shane: Yeah they did that thing where the Canadian
money is now made of plastic, since the last couple of years. You can't tear
it, and it apparently lasts longer BUT if you leave it in your pockets when you
put your clothes in the dryer, it MELTS! So it's virtually indestructible,
other than heat. Heat will destroy it. (laughs) It will melt your money in your
pocket.
Also when you're counting bills they stick together.
Jesse: It's kinda...
Shane: ... dumb. But I'm sure they did it for a
reason. It last significantly longer I guess. I don't know other countries that
actually have plastic money.
Jesse : This is fascinating material!
Shane: Canadian blunders.
During a previous
interview you finished off by saying "Don't do as Donny Don't Does"(a
reference to the Simpsons)
Shane: Oh God, I think that was something I filled
up.
Jesse: Yeah I think you said that (laugh)
Shane: I think that was a European interview.
Jesse: What was the context of that?
Shane: ... I don't know... I was being an asshole
Jesse: Don't do what Donny Don't Does (bursting out
laughing)... It was probably in regards to what we were doing with our lives
(laughing out loud).
(Laughing) Every goddamn thing you say relates
to life itself!
Shane (With Jesse hysterically laughing in the
back all throughout):
I remember writing that. I think it was the final garbage question, like
"Any advice for the kids?" "Fuuck... Don't do what Donny Don't
does". I think because it was a European interview, I thought that in
translation, it would get completely fucked! (laughs)
Jesse: That is a good advice!
Shane: Kids today won't get that though,
it's too old, old-school Simpsons (note: Season 5 Episode 8, Boy-Scoutz N the
Hood). That was 20 years ago!
Could you name one of your favorite albums,
movies and books?
Jesse: One of my favorite albums would have
to be Nirvana, In Utero, because that's the one that just ruined my brain when
I was 12. That's why we wanted to work with Albini. It sounded too good.
One of my
favorite movies: The Elephant Man by
David Lynch, because it's one of the
only movies that has made me cry more than once and because it's just...
fucked.
For my
favorite book: another life changer, Get in the Van by Henry Rollins. That's where we got our
band name from and a lot of the way we approach doing music. It's got a lot of
pearls of wisdom for DIY bands and I think it's worth reading for anyone interested
in underground music.
Shane: I'm just gonna back your choice. I
think those are all excellent answers. (Laughs)
And to close things off: any final words?
Jesse: I hope people purchase Success to make it a great Success! (laughs)
Shane: And don't do what Donny Don't does!
Interview by Robin Ono
Band Photo by Brenna Faris, courtesy of Seasons of Mist.
Thank you to Gunnar, to Lauren, to
the band and everyone who made both this amazing show and this interview
possible!
