Karnivool Asymmetry

In 2009, Karnivool released a landmark album in Australian progressive rock: Sound Awake. In between stints fronting Birds of Tokyo, vocalist Ian Kenny settled back into the Perth five-piece to help create what just might be the most intentionally jarring follow-up to a bona fide classic: 2013’s Asymmetry. Asymmetry’s destination begins and ends with ambient wonderings “Aum” and “Om” respectively. Both words are variants of what Hinduism believes to have been the first sound the universe ever made. The primordial hum of creation cannot even be settled upon. Human brains like symmetry, for things to be neat and to make sense. The world and its people, however, are random and complicated. “A paranoid is someone who knows a little of what’s going on. A psychotic is a guy who’s just found out what’s going on,” author William S. Burroughs once said. If Sound Awake represented the intoxicating paranoia of realising, then Asymmetry is the sobering psychopathy of realisation. “Why the hell did I seek the truth?/All I've seen in its reflection/Is a part of me regrets it,” Kenny sings on “Aeons”. Asymmetry is a reaction to realisation. Brasher, noisier and wildly experimental—even lead single “We Are” pushes the concept of “accessible” over the edge—it’s a record that’s more interested in asking in a loud and increasingly desperate voice: How does a restless dreamer fit into a world where sleeping upright has been standardised? Are they, in fact, interchangeable? As “The Refusal”—easily Karnivool’s heaviest song to date—concludes in no uncertain terms: “This isn’t possible/This is impossible.” Kenny is not famed for his screaming—quite the opposite—but he does a lot of screaming on this track. Fittingly, there is little to no cohesive structure be found in Asymmetry’s songs. Largely through-composed, it’s an album all but defined by its title. The players themselves mirror the discontent inherent in seeking contentment: Apart from on “Sky Machine”, drummer Steve Judd almost never acknowledges a consistent downbeat. The duelling, textural work of guitarists Drew Goddard and Mark Hosking are often panned intriguingly before meeting it in the middle—and dispersing just as quickly. On “A.M. War”, it’s as if they’re pursuing entirely different ideas, only to reconcile in a sort of triumph of beauty over brutality. “The Last Few” publicly boils over. “Float” privately regards itself. “Alpha Omega” turns on the light and exposes the flaws and virtues of virulence and contemplation while embodying both. As he was on Sound Awake, bassist Jon Stockman again takes centre-stage as the loudest, most driving harmonic force on Asymmetry. If you took the bass out of second single “Eidolon”, you wouldn’t have a song. No one and nothing ever does what anyone or anything else is doing. In doing so, Asymmetry achieves an apex of sense—of alienating symmetry, no less—that is as spiritual as the journey it no doubt took to articulate the peculiar human experience of simply acknowledging the human experience.