#jesse matthewson

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Kathryn Kerr and Jesse Matthewson of KEN Mode performing live at Tilburn's Roadburn Festival; 2023.

📷: Peter Troest

[sinceileftyoublog]

KEN Mode Interview: Sound That Bites

Photo by Brenna Harris

BY JORDAN MAINZER

When I interviewed KEN Mode’s Jesse Matthewson five years ago around the release of their great Entrench, he was working an office job, thought about in the same circle as a band like Pissed Jeans who sing angry, self-deprecating office jock rock. Five years later, life’s a lot different. (“Feels like an eternity,” he tells me.) This time, he’s calling from a new job--the music management company he’s started with his brother and bandmate Shane. It’s been a full three years since they released Entrench follow-up Success, a stylistic change towards the quieter and a comparative critical flop. After that album, Matthewson was burned out but kept going. He immediately started experimenting with some of the songs that would become their latest record Loved, recorded and co-written with new bassist Scott Hamilton, co-produced, recorded, and mixed by Andrew Schneider, and featuring saxophonist Kathryn Kerr on a few tracks. Loved is a step back to the noisy but also a step forward in sonic diversity.

After Loved was recorded, Matthewson went to Thailand to train in Muay Thai, which he practices regularly. (He participated in its over headphones while there.) Fast-forward to now, and the band is on their first tour since the Matthewson brothers started their own company, and they’re simultaneously balancing both professions--and the fitness regime. They’ve got a week more in the Northeast U.S. and Canada and then spend three weeks in Europe. In 2019, they hope to return to both the U.S. and Europe (and obviously tour Canada) and maybe even Australia.

Read the rest of our conversation, edited for length and clarity, below.

Since I Left You: Do you think Loved sounds more like Entrench than Success?

Jesse Matthewson: Yeah, there are obviously similarities between what we’re doing now and what we’ve always done in the past. But I do feel like this is an entirely new beast that utilizes maybe some of the same skills we’ve used in the past. A lot of the styles of the riffs are a fair amount different. Vocally, I feel it’s got a wider range and, if anything, more intensity than I think we’ve ever had. The songwriting itself--every time we change bassists, we have a new feel. This is the most collaborative effort we’ve ever had. Scott and I developed all the riffs as opposed to either one of us going into isolation and presenting something.

SILY: When you collaborated together, was that after or before you went to Thailand?

JM: I actually went to Thaliand immediately after we finished recording it.

SILY: Then it went to mastering?

JM: We were mastering it when I was in Thaliand. It wasn’t super fun doing it over headphones, but I had Shane back here listening on big stereos and Andrew listening over in Brooklyn. At least we had good fresh ears around the equipment.

SILY: What made you want to study Muay Thai?

JM: I’ve been training it the past 11 years in Winnipeg anyway. Since it’s the national sport of Thaliand, they kind of invented it. It’s known as the mecca--if you want to learn from the best, you go to Thailand. A friend of mine and training partner was out there for three months at the beginning of the year. He was trying to get me to go, and I knew logistically, the timing wasn’t the best, but at the same time, I didn’t have a ton to do work-wise at the beginning of February. I had a life savings worth of aeroplane miles and spent next to nothing and stayed there for like a month.

SILY: What does practicing Muay Thai do for you?

JM: It’s like music--especially extreme music. It’s something you never stop learning. It’s also a natural form of anti-depressants for me. I need exercise to regulate all the chemicals that are flowing through my body and potentially throwing my brain off track. I suffered from depressive episodes since I was a teenager, and this has been the ultimate way of managing that process. I haven’t had very many problems since I started doing Muay Thai. 

Exercise is obviously important to any healthy adult--we’re animals, after all, and we need to release that. Our lifestyles of sitting around in jobs is not a natural process, and our bodies and minds are meant to have fight or flight going on. If you’re having those responses to stupid bullshit with other people in an office, you’re not getting that release you need. For me, it’s such a major way to blow out some steam. When I was younger, music used to suffice, but at least since I was 25, I know it wasn’t enough. I kind of need the combination to remain relatively chilled out.

SILY: It’s an interesting juxtaposition with a song on Loved like “Feathers & Lips”. You’ve mentioned that’s inspired by politicians who seem aggressive but can’t fight.

JM: A lot of the most aggressive, biggest assholes are big fat dudes. What the fuck? [laughs]

SILY: They can’t control what’s inside them, and it manifests itself in the worst ways as opposed to in a controlled, healthy, productive way.

JM: A lot of fighter types were more aggressive bully types until they started training and fighting. That started to regulate that. That weird psychological side to them. With training any kind of martial art, you get humbled early on. It’s not like I had a problem with aggression--I had never even fought in my life before starting to train. I had never thrown a punch or been punched. For me, it’s that constant learning for something I’m not naturally good at. I’m not an athlete, which is funny because in the touring circuit of the style of music we’re a part of, people treat Shane and I as almost jocks because we’re fit. It’s funny, because we’re the furthest thing from that. We just exercise so we don’t go crazy.

Loved album cover by Randy Ortiz

SILY: Switching gears--the song “Not Soulmates” is about relationships. What made you want to sing about that?

JM: It wasn’t even so much wanting to sing about it; it was just the most entertaining lines that came out. [laughs] The idea of “not soulmates.” 

Writing for us is a collaborative effort. I take a bunch of lines and try to string these entertaining soundbites into a cohesive narrative with my and other people’s writing. The whole concept of KEN Mode lyric writing has totally changed over the past couple records. It used to just be me writing. Over the last record, it’s a whole band plus people around us. There are lines on this record that my father wrote, that Scott’s wife Cate wrote, that our comedian friend Garrett Jamieson wrote. It’s really a wild mixture of people surrounding us in our lives. It makes it more of a sense of family. It makes it way more fun. I enjoy that as a concept. This band is more than just a band to us at this point.

Circling back to the actual content of that song, the best parts of it are Shane referring to our emotional baggage with the concept of marriage. The main chorus line Scott’s wife sent to him when they were on a bit of a vacation on the West Coast, which pulled the whole thing together.

SILY: So they wrote lines without even knowing?

JM: Yeah. People saying something that we think on paper is funny and turn it into something completely different. [laughs]

SILY: Are you currently in a relationship?

JM: I am presently. I wasn’t when a lot of this record was written.

SILY: Do you think you would have written a song like this, independent of your personal life?

JM: Yeah. There are are definitely some aspects that are a time and a place that I pulled specific narratives from. But I think a lot of the concepts still remain the same.

SILY: The closer, “No Gentle Art”, is different than the rest of the song, including the arrangement, length, peaks and valleys. How did you come up with that song?

JM: The beginning stages of that song I think I was writing playing alone around Christmas of 2016--maybe even 2015. I can’t remember. It was one of those years. I started with that pulsing knocking sound on the bass. I started playing the first riff and looped it around for what must have been 45 minutes, in a bit of a trance. That’s how that song got going. We didn’t really make much of a song of it until we did a pre-production demo in May of 2017 where we were basically recording the material we had until that point. We had that riff. I had an idea of where I wanted it to go with the ending section. We basically pasted two pieces together and experimented over the top of it. That’s where we got a little more of the beat over it. The lyrics were a combination of my and Scott’s writing in the studio. After that, we started to piece together things and edit things and created more of a build with it--that chorus line that breaks off of that first bass line, when it’s just that distorted bass. I also edited the lyrics probably a little bit before we recorded the album proper. Scott lost his father in October of last year and did some writing as a reaction to that, and some of those words were too powerful not to use, so they replaced some of the other ones of the song. And right before the tracking, we came up with the parts for Kathryn on the saxophone, and that again created a very different shift for that song. But to me, it made it feel like more of a song, whereas the pre-production demo was two very noisy parts squished together. It was a cool idea, but we wanted to create more of a narrative. We got there. We hit the nail on the head.

SILY: Her saxophone playing on “The Illusion of Dignity” appears just at the end, but it’s really prominent throughout “This Is A Love Test”. How did you come up with her saxophone parts in general?

JM: Initially, my big plan was that I wanted to have cello and saxophone all over the record. We messed around a bunch in those pre-production sessions. The cello parts felt muddy. It didn’t fit with the tone of the guitar and bass and kind of clouded the overall vision of those songs. We felt like the saxophone parts, the tone cut better and fit in more properly with what we were trying to accomplish. Yet, as we recorded the album, we realized we didn’t want it to be a gimmick we were leaning on constantly song-by-song. So we wanted to make it much more punctuated and make the parts mean something. 

“The Illusion of Dignity”, it came across more like a free jazz solo at the end. It helped decompose that song. It’s got that lurching, drunken feeling. I wanted to lean back on that--I hate to call it sludgy, because I don’t like that term--it’s kind of swampy. Super down-tune. I like the idea of having the chaotic sax coming back on top of that, particularly the way Shane switches over with the 8th note on the kick drum beats. That’s one of my favorite moments of us as a band.

Switching over to “This Is A Love Test”, we felt that needed proper parts written. When that song kicks off, the imagery felt like a noir film, like dark jazz, this very, very ugly lounge scene. That’s why we came back to the saxophone in a very different way. We wanted to keep it fresh--it’s not being used the same way every time. Shifting keys again in “No Gentle Art”, it’s basically a tool of chaos.

SILY: Do you listen to a lot of free jazz or punk that uses jazz instruments?

JM: Yeah. In 2016, I got more heavily into jazz. I had never delved into it too deeply. I was listening to a lot of jazz through 2016, which gave me part of the inspiration to experiment with those instruments. But also the post-punk bands I’ve been listening to--the no wave scene. There were a couple bands that put out noisy records I enjoyed who used sax on a lot of their tracks. I liked the way they were using it, in a sort of art rock context. We didn’t use sax as heavily as originally intended, but I think the way we used it was refreshing but not annoying. I know that’s one of the main complaints people have when sax is used non-traditionally. It just kind of comes across as a stupid gimmick. People don’t even like instruments out of the realm of guitar, bass, drums. If that’s a deal-breaker for our record for some people, so be it. It doesn’t beat people over the head, but it creates some really cool aspects.

SILY: What jazz or punk artists were you listening to at the time?

JM: Parlor Walls put out a record I really like in 2017. They used a lot of saxophone. I was listening to a lot of BadBadNotGood. Mouse on the Keys, although they didn’t use saxophone--they’re largely just two pianos and drums. There’s a whole bunch of jazz I’m not going to remember off the top of my head.

SILY: How are you adapting these songs live without the extra instrumentation?

JM: Ideally, we’d like to start taking Kathryn on tour with us, but it’s not going to work out in the fall. So we literally just took her samples on the record, and we have them in our sample pad. We’re in the process of learning how to play with them. I hope that works. We’ve done that in the past with Eugene Robinson’s collaboration with us on “Blessed”, and we’ve done that for chaotic cello parts. I really hope we can play it properly.

SILY: Five years ago, you were working an office job. Now, you’ve started your own company. Are you generally a bit more satisfied with life?

JM: Oh, 100%. At times, I almost have to take a step back and marvel at the fact that I played a long game, and so far, it seems to be paying off. The only reason I ever got a Bachelor of Commerce was because I thought that was the only way I would be able to make money being involved in the only industry I actually care about: music. It’s always been a problem when it came to schooling. I could never excel at anything the way I felt I should because music was always taking the front seat. It was the monkey on my back. I figured if I got a business degree, I could work in music and actually make money in something I found interesting. I’m not gonna lie, one of the reasons I was interested in touring full-time was because I felt like nobody would take KEN Mode seriously unless we did that, and the rest was to develop some contacts to see whether I could spin a job out of this industry. When we burnt out at the end of Success, we pitched this idea that we’d use our book learnins’, put ‘em to good use, and we formed this practice. Over the past couple years, it’s taken off quite well. We’re making a living off of this. It’s pretty cool.

SILY: You’re your own boss, so it’s not like you have to ask for time off to go on tour.

JM: Nope! Though that side of things we’re mildly terrified about. Obviously, we have a bunch of dates coming up, and this is the first time we’ve attempted to tour since we started these jobs. We’re gonna see how this works, attempting to keep up with work while on tour. The runs aren’t nearly as long, but at the same time, we think they may be about the maximum amount of dates we can do at any one time while keeping the train on the tracks.

SILY: Anything else you’ve been listening to or reading or watching lately that’s caught your attention?

JM: This year’s been kind of weird. I’ve been enjoying a lot of blackened death metal but nothing has stood out in the way that I’m gushing. I just got the new Imperial Triumphant record in the mail. I enjoyed that a lot. The new Craft record. Otherwise, I feel kind of weird there hasn’t been much outside blackened death metal to me. It’s the main genre that’s been saying something to me. It’s telling of the mind-space that I’m in. Even artistically speaking with movies and TV, nothing’s really wowed me lately. Maybe I’m depressed.

Tour dates:

Oct 25 Photo City Improv & Live Music Rochester, NY

Oct 26 Bovine Sex Club Toronto, ON

Oct 27 Turbo Haus Montreal, QC

Oct 28 La Source de la Martinière Québec, QC

Oct 29 HOUSE of TARG Ottawa, ON

Nov 15 Le Temps Machine Joué-Les-Tours, France

Nov 16 L'Astrolabe Orléans, France

Nov 17 Void Bordeaux, France

Nov 18 Rex Toulouse, France

Nov 19 Blacksheep Montpellier, France

Nov 20 Chez Raymond Clermont-Ferrand, France

Nov 21 Romandie Lausanne, Switzerland

Nov 22 L'Antonnoir Besançon, France

Nov 23 Die Stadtmitte Karlsruhe, Germany

Nov 24 Cbgc's Gigors, France

Nov 25 Circolo Magnolia Segrate, Italy

Nov 27 Le Ferrailleur Nantes, France

Nov 28 Fort De Tourneville Le Havre, France

Nov 29 Petit Bain Paris, France

Nov 30 Le Bistrot de St So Lille, France

Dec 01 The Macbeth London, UK

Dec 02 Magasin 4 Brussels, Belgium

[earpeeler]

Squared Circle Pit – #17 - KEN MODE's Jesse Matthewson Talks Canadian Wrestling

Squared Circle Pit – #17 – KEN MODE’s Jesse Matthewson Talks Canadian Wrestling

He’s from Winnipeg, you idiot! We have KEN Mode frontman Jesse Matthewson on the Squared Circle Pit this week. We spend a lot of time talking about the Monday Night Wars, what Raw and Nitro did well, and what they failed at. We talk about keeping up with the frenetic pace of wrestling nowadays, and some of Shane’s favorite matches. http://traffic.libsyn.com/metalinjection2/17_Squared_Circle_Pit_1…

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Interview: KEN Mode's Jesse Matthewson talks about their 'Success'

Interview: KEN Mode’s Jesse Matthewson talks about their ‘Success’

KEN Mode have always had an Amphetamine Reptile noise rock heart beating beneath their hardcore exterior. For their sixth album, Success, the Canadian band fully embraced the former sound, calling in Steve Albini to record the album. If listening expecting to hear a metal album, you might be disappointed, but it’s a rewarding album that transcends genres. Jesse Matthewson caught up with up on the…

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[wrepisodes]

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WR #71: "Tex-Mex Single of the Year" with guest Jesse Matthewson of KEN Mode

KEN Mode frontman Jesse Matthewson joins the fellas to talk about his band's grueling tour schedule, the Juno Awards and this week's randomly-generated theme word, "king". Witchpolice Radio (as a podcast) is available for free download and streaming. Check out the archives at http://www.witchpolice.com/p/podcasts.html. It's also broadcast Monday nights at 11 pm on 101.5 UMFM in Winnipeg, or umfm.com if you're not in Winnipeg.

[wrepisodes]

WR #71: "Tex-Mex Single of the Year" with guest Jesse Matthewson of KEN Mode

KEN Mode frontman Jesse Matthewson joins the fellas to talk about his band's grueling tour schedule, the Juno Awards and this week's randomly-generated theme word, "king". Witchpolice Radio (as a podcast) is available for free download and streaming. Check out the archives at http://www.witchpolice.com/p/podcasts.html. It's also broadcast Monday nights at 11 pm on 101.5 UMFM in Winnipeg, or umfm.com if you're not in Winnipeg.

[feedbackrockblog]

KEN MODE, mira un nuevo vídeo musical de su último álbum.

         “Counter Culture Complex“ es la canción que abre  el quinto disco de Ken Mode , “Entrench ”, que salió a la venta el 15 de marzo con la producción de  Matt Bayles, (Mastodon, Isis, Botch)