ALBUM REVIEW: Kaonashi – ‘I Want To Go Home’

Mathcore being retrofitted with 2000s emo might be one of the best things to ever happen to it. It gives this notoriously unstable style something lean on, for one, and the highlights that emerge from it can often be rather stellar. The fact that this is style of metal undergoing something of a change without its purists having a conniption should say it all. (What constitutes a mathcore purist isn’t exactly pronounced, but they have to exist, right?) And then there’s Kaonashi, whose continuing high school musical has used those emo impulses in the most ingeniously sensible context possible. Why wouldn’t a discography of millennial teenage horrordom draw inspiration from its original, built-for-purpose soundtrack?

Perhaps you could stretch that thread even further and say that, in keeping with the ol’ ‘outcast’ archetype, there’s no one else who sounds exactly like Kaonashi. More accurately, there’s no one else who sounds like Peter Rono, with a voice that’s like several Muppets shrieking in unison while having the oxygen sucked out of them. Without a doubt, it is, and has always been, one of the most unique performance styles in all of alternative music, and an ‘acquired taste’ insofar as it’s just that singular. Honestly, it gives off the impression of wanting to embody mathcore’s usual flurry of knives moulded into the shape of words, but there’s too much comprehensibility to get it there, and it makes Kaonashi all the better. There’s barely a moment where that’s not the case on I Want To Go Home; it’s the most fun you’ll have with a mathcore band this year not named The Callous Daoboys.

Had this been an even marginally worse album, you really would’ve felt for Kaonashi for that exact reason. It’s not even been a month since I Don’t Want To See You In Heaven, and Kaonashi looking to slot into the same design space as one of the highlights of the year thus far could be a monumentally thankless ask. I Want To Go Home isn’t so much lesser, thankfully, but it should still be addressed all the same. It’s not as laser-crafted in its melodies, nor as erratic in its biggest swings, ultimately rounding out to an album without as huge an area to wow.

Though, when you consider that Kaonashi are being pitted against a career-defining work from one of the scene’s longstanding shining lights—all against their will, too—can you be that let down? I Want To Go Home still has more than its fair share of sparks of excellence, coming from the same creative sources, in multiple cases. On When I Say and Fly On The Way (An Orange Sidewalk Paved Around Your Feet), the soaring emo hooks are running at full steam. Later, the four-act closer The Sanguine is more nominally a grand suite than in practice, though the impulse of an utterly audacious set of final notes plays in many of the same spaces as Country Song In Reverse. There are even some blindspots that Kaonashi have snapped up all for themselves, namely a rich vein of Midwest emo that simmers on the interlude Extra Prayers before being implanted on J.A.M.I.E., one of the album’s overall highlights.

To be completely honest, though, bouncing back and forth to compare attributes isn’t a useful practice. Kaonashi get a rawer deal than they deserve from it, mostly because I Want To Go Home has its own things to say and do. It’s the perfect way to pinpoint the best of Rono and his deliberacy in always sound on the verge of a full meltdown. You’ll see that on Red Sink, Yellow Teeth, a very emo heartbreak song framed through the narrator spitting blood when brushing his teeth, and having the blows of panic and anxiety land one more good clout. Slower Forms Of Suicide does the same with what feels like an anti-smoking song coated in Kaonashi’s quasi-approximation of nu-metal. Finally, in fitting ending stead, The Sanguine IV – Exit Pt. VII (The Confession Of Classroom 2114) finds its minor-key piano-balladry crumble and unravel as it goes, as mathcore’s theatre kids round out their semester on yet another flagrant, dramatic note.

There’s some great stuff on I Want To Go Home, playing to a number of strengths that Kaonashi have distilled to enhance their potency. Far be it to say this is ‘accessible’, but if you’ve got some experience with emo or metalcore’s wackier, more spasmodic sides, there’s likely something here that would stick. It might be Kaonashi’s best album in that regard, as mathcore that‘s wholeheartedly being itself like this can be something of a rarity. Of course, the slug of emo in there helps, and if you’re looking to isolate what’s nudging this to the next rung, it is that. It’s just that, in the seamless way it’s been integrated, you barely notice it as some errant ‘new element’. That way, Kaonashi can focus on their own barely-restrained insanity and thrive amongst it, as they deserve to do.

For fans of: The Callous Daoboys, Protest The Hero, The Fall Of Troy

‘I Want To Go Home’ by Kaonashi is released on 6th June on Rude Records / Equal Vision Records.

Words by Luke Nuttall