Even on songs that strike classic KEN mode noise-rock-warped-hardcore (“The Shrike,” “I Cannot”), a classy lead bass scuttle or squeak-leading sax break add valuable, frantic, escape-minded dimensions to these despondent scurries. At every song’s base brother Shane Matthewson supplies a math rock-nimble, krautrock hypnotic motorik, which finds equal punctuation from throbbing bass slides, sneaky vocal layering, and whatever else Kathryn Kerr can offer-bubbling synth, piano accents, woodwind diversions, you name it.

The snare-marching “Painless,” the macabre-dancing “These Wires,” the soul-dragging “A Reluctance…” all hold the same joint conveyance, that of a buoyant and nimble low-end that carries a lightness against dissonant and scraping guitar wails. No matter how desolate the horizon feels among vocalist/guitarist Jesse Matthewson’s death mantras of “A lifetime of building, crumbling down” (“A Reluctance…”) or “There is no escape from our mistakes” (“The Shrike”), his sonically-gifted friends surround him to propel the narrative. But where NULL led with an unsettling hiss leaking from bottled madness, VOID spirals quickly into a different kind of disintegration.

In this post-metal meets hardcore lane KEN mode remains recognizable in craft-informed by contemporaries like the swinging dirge-leaders of Kowloon Walled City or the hypnotic, corrosive recluses of Khanate-recalling motifs from NULL along the way (“These Wires,” “A Reluctance…”). In such care, VOID claws the walls of a misery pit with Sisyphean acceleration (“Painless”), failure recognition (“These Wires,” “A Reluctance of Being”), misanthropic melodies (“He Was a Good Man, He Was a Taxpayer,” “Not Today, Old Friend”) that feel as frighteningly familiar as they do too masterfully and meticulously executed. An excellent album, though, takes that basic understanding and warps it between its own capable and agonizingly calloused hands. It’s easy to align with an album emotionally when it plays on base, powerful moods-the collapse of an already gone mind, unfortunately, falls in that realm. There’s an unwelcome nostalgia to pain, an unfortunate ease to melancholy, but rather than be just a pity piece for the shittiest of extended days, VOID finds a mechanical trudge forward that keeps all from feeling completely lost… right? In the fallout VOID finds its grayscale home. So told the NULL prophecy, a fluctuation of anger to aggression. Though KEN mode has little to fret over in the performance realm, the returning four-piece lineup boasting some of the most diverse and rich talents of the band’s career, a troubled mind, this demon state, does not find solace through notes of proficiency and creativity. NULL‘s intense and twisted Red Demon has fractured into a split visage of terrified sadness and caved-in confidence. Here we are again strung upon KEN mode’s newest, fresh-faced outing, VOID-well, as fresh a face as these Canucks can muster.

Fallout confidence man