It’s been six long years since Oakland-based bruisers Kowloon Walled City’s last album, 2015’s Grievances. With so much having changed in the world, it’s hardly surprising that the band’s nervy, Neurosis-infused noise has taken on an ever-more paranoid edge that fits well with the band’s dynamic soundscapes. The result is an album that seems to capture the same sense of isolation that has been inflicted on so many in society in recent months and, while the album may hark back sonically to the art-rock of mid-period Swans and Sonic Youth, a corrosive sludge element serves to blacken the approach that is both draining and yet cathartic at the same time.
Opening with the doom-laden trudge of Piecework, the band immediately set out their stall as purveyors of a unique darkness that mixes vocal belligerence with semi-clean riffs, which nevertheless manage to physically impact all who stand in their way. Slow-paced, even reminiscent of Khanate at points, Utopian emerges out of a wall of feedback as the BPM drops radically. The music provides the perfect backdrop for Scott Evans’ Gira-esque proclamations, invoking a sense of claustrophobia in all but the hardiest of listeners as the bass stabs and probes around the edges of your sanity. Nothing invokes dread quite so much as medical technology, and (the) Oxygen Tent, with all its implications of confinement and contorted, ruptured lungs, is among the more sinister devices. Strangely, for Kowloon Walled City, it prompts an elegant, albeit dynamic, piece of music, ranging from Botch-esque hardcore fury, to eerie, ISIS-esque post-rock drone. An ambitious piece that manages more in a mere five minutes than some bands manage on an entire album, it’s a masterful display of tension and release. In contrast, the angular noise of You Had A Plan owes more to the Martin Bisi-produced no-wave of the early 80s, the jangly guitar and barely-present percussion seeking to obscure a metallic tsunami that takes more than three-minutes of the track’s runtime to finally appear.
Having deftly rearranged the listener’s nerve endings with the ominous swell of You Had A Plan, KWC once again head for a calmer space with Splicing. While the pressure slowly builds throughout the track, a sense of dark beauty and mystery remains throughout, no matter how gruelling the basslines become. Slow-paced and intense, When We Fall Through The Floor harnesses an incongruous sense of majesty that is hard to ignore and the band’s dynamic attack (think a slow-moving Helmet) only adds to the sense of space found here. Final track Lampblack is more straightforward, the band drawing out a single riff and working it into a towering monolith that feels truly threatening. It is the album’s heart of darkness and while, at four-minutes, the band are unwilling to let it outstay its welcome, the net result is still a track that leaves the listener somewhat shaken.
Dense, dark and yet with a sense of fragile beauty that only becomes apparent with repeated listens, Piecework is another impressive album from Kowloon Walled City. Musically innovative and emotionally honest, the album is the sonic equivalent of a nightmare: soothing one moment, suddenly plunging the listener into sweat-soaked horror the next. What really sets the band apart is a deft sense of dynamic, that eschews the typical bludgeoning of sludge for a more spacious approach that is all the more effective for its restraint. It makes for a continually engaging album that is well worth exploring. 9/10
