ALBUM REVIEW: Paramnesia – Kusanagi

With their first album in nearly a decade, KUSANAGI have dipped into the dream world to inspire their sound. The instrumental four-piece, hailing from Liverpool, are as well-versed in the math rock tropes of tricky time signatures and busy melodic guitar lines as they are in the crescendos of post rock. But their third album, Paramnesia, is more concerned with building atmosphere than moments of in-your-face technicality or repeated heaviness.

The album opens with Night Symmetry, a showcase of the band’s duality of influences. It begins with crashing cymbals and weaving guitar lines, often leaning on the bass to propel the rhythm forward alone. But a middle section veers into a pacey off-kilter riff; a wellspring of impatience amidst its otherwise anthemic post-rock structure. Continual guitar lead lines drive the song, a unifying thread across the album.

Early single Polymorph lives up to its name with doubled twisting guitar lines, showing intricacy alongside the continual chiming melodic phrases. The use of chopped time signatures is a repeated motif across Paramnesia; combined with the sparing but clever dips into dissonant harmonic phrases, it brings a sense that not everything is as it seems, a distortion in the membrane between dream and reality. The song bounces between various patterns before finding a rare moment of melodic catharsis in the outro.

That lucid quality comes to the fore for In Sleep We Heal: sampled drums, micro-chromatic pitch shifts, heavy use of delay, and a languid tempo do much to craft atmosphere without leaning heavily on a cheesy palette of synths. It’s the best direct example of the album’s ethos of messages through dreams and memory, though the production does much to unify this for the other songs. The energy gets kicked up a gear in Equilibria: a much faster affair in a 5/4 time signature that lets the handbrake off with some driving power chords and a succession of crescendo builds.

There’s no shortage of changing dynamics in the multiple sections that make up second single Spacial Awareness. Across its seven-minute runtime are islands of serene calm, tense riffs and full-throttle crashes. Its structure lacks consistency, leaning heavily on the meandering guitar lead lines to pull the whole thing together. It also lacks a killer hook, melody or emotional release to pay off. Follow-up Luminosity is marginally more successful: a more strident affair with stronger dynamic separation. It successfully hits upon the high drama that makes up Paramnesia‘s best moments.

With the average track length clocking in at over six minutes, and dreamlike tempos and textures abounding, Paramnesia can come across as a little one-note. Breaks from the formula are noticeable and welcome, not least in the intricate opening to Physics of Colour. Twisty, math-like guitars and start-stop drums catch the attention, see-sawing between escalating versions of these textures and more sedate yet harmonically surprising movements, in keeping with the rest of the album.

Paramnesia closes with single Dream Projector, which, after a slow-burn start, finally unwinds the album’s tension with full-throttle power chords, crashing drums and cathartic melody. After some three quarters of an hour of restraint on the louder sections, either through compressed length or intermixing with quieter sections, it fully earns its five minutes of heaviness.

The trouble with creating music with the aesthetic of dream states in mind is that dreams are inherently blurry, indistinct, tricky to recollect. Credit must go to KUSANAGI for delivering on a consistent vision, and Paramnesia has plenty to enjoy, particularly in a strong second half. But as an album, it lacks immediacy or an unforgettable hook. Instead, it’s content to let the dedicated listener absorb its meanings and depth at their own pace, rather than demand it.

Rating: 7/10

Paramnesia is out now via Ripcord Records.

Like KUSANAGI on Facebook.