The five heavy-rocking lads from KARNIVOOL have spent most of the last 12 months bunkered down in an intense creative bootcamp in Perth's Blackbird Studios, meticulously crafting a richly textured new album, Sound Awake. It's been four years now since Karnivool's debut Themata set a new benchmark for what melodic heavy rock records could achieve - blending experimental tunings, intriguing time signatures and sonically diverse guitar melodies, all bound together by a gifted, almost angelic new vocalist in Ian Kenny.
When I catch up with the band's guitarist Drew Goddard, he's in a very relaxed place, satisfied that the months of studio labour have made for a fine record. Goddard says that despite the precision of the finished product, his band followed no set plan during the recording process.
"The process of recording this album was a really strange and confusing one, and unorthodox to say the least," Goddard says. "Most bands have different stages: they go from writing to pre-production, to recording, to mixing and so on, whereas with Sound Awake, it all sort of blended into one."
A four year break between albums gave Karnivool the opportunity to tour its Themata album relentlessly, watching the crowds grow ever bigger as word of mouth lifted the band from the local Perth scene to rock headliners across the country.
"Themata was a real slow burner," Goddard confirms. "We only did a local launch for that album, which was good and we had a good local following for it, but then we kind of sat on our hands for a few months and thought that the local response might be it. Then we sent Cog the album and they really liked it, so we ended up doing a national tour with them and then triple j jumped on it and suddenly we were getting a whole lot of gigs. We ended up touring that album for two or three years."
With an ever-growing list of concerts and festivals to play off the strength of one album, Karnivool could afford to take the time to hone Sound Awake slowly and carefully. The result is an intricately layered rock album that ranges across a vast expanse of sonic terrain; canvassing twisted, explosive punk to sprawling, explorative rock jams. Fresh from his stint at the head of Birds of Tokyo, Ian Kenny is in fine form, drawing Sound Awake's wide array of differing sounds together with his impossibly pure, melodic vocals.
As the creative masterminds of Themata, Goddard and Kenny made a decision to share the songwriting load this time around, making for a fuller, more collaborative album. "Everyone in the band respects each other's opinion, so we decided to be passengers in the Karnivool vehicle and different people took the wheel at different points," explains Goddard. "There's really a piece of everyone on Sound Awake, as opposed to just me and Kenny as it was for Themata."
Passing up the driver's seat takes a good amount of trust in your fellow bandmates. This trust from Goddard and Kenny was rewarded with a much more diverse album on Sound Awake, an album which takes Karnivool's progressive rock sound to much fruitier frontiers.
"One thing we all realise is that Sound Awake is bigger and better than anything that we could have done individually. There are things on there that I just would never have thought of doing. A lot of stuff came really spontaneously from jams and improv sessions. We record our jams and we'd occasionally lift whole sections of music straight onto the album. It's a perfect example of a collaborative effort - it was nothing that any individual in the band came up with alone, it was a unit that wrote that section spontaneously, almost without thinking about it."
First single Set Fire to the Hive is something of a departure for the band and is a highly charged and strangely twisted punk anthem. Goddard says the song was born out of the frustration of waiting around the recording studio. "It came after a bit of a creative drought," he explains. "So that song was us kind of gritting our teeth and lashing out and it's got a bit of snarl to it. It's this anarchic, kind of progressive punk song that is a bit different for us, which is why it really stands out on the album."
The themes of anarchy and political deception run throughout Sound Awake, encouraging listeners to question what they're being told. "Lyrically it's up to interpretation for people to make of it what they will, but that theme of anarchy does run through a couple of the tracks," Goddard affirms. "More generally it's an album about questioning the status quo and what we're told. We all made the decision pretty early on that the difference between what people are told is going on and what is actually going on is absolutely huge, so Sound Awake was quite exploratory in that sense."
Returning to Canberra as part of the Trackside Festival, Karnivool are ready to show fans that the new album has been worth the wait. "We've kept missing out on Canberra on the last couple of tours. We did all the big capital cities, but Canberra always seems to get the blunt end, which we know a bit about living over here in Perth. So we're really itching to get back there and play again."
Be sure to catch Karnivool as part of this year's Trackside Festival, held on Saturday November 21. Tickets can be purchased through Ticketek, Moshtix, Oztix and Landspeed Records.
