The Oakland-based heavy music band returns with its first album in 6 years. Concise and crystal clear, it feels almost provocatively unadorned.
Heaviness isn’t measured in volume in Kowloon Walled City’s music. Some of the most crushing parts of Piecework, the Bay Area band’s fourth full-length, are moments of total silence. Tension and release are crucial parts of the doom metal and noise rock they draw from, but those dynamics are rarely executed this patiently—or powerfully. Throughout Piecework, tension is drawn with excruciating pauses that hang longer than you expect, and the release comes not as a booming crescendo but as a relieved exhale. It’s subtle work, and Kowloon Walled City are the rare loud band that asks you to lean in closely to hear everything they’re doing.
Minimalism has always been a weapon in Kowloon Walled City’s arsenal. They’ve never had much fat on their compositions, but on Piecework, even the connective tissue has been excised. The elements are the same as ever, all grinding against each: sparse guitars, rattling bass, bone-dry drums, and Scott Evans’ anxious howl. It’s not as though earlier Kowloon Walled City albums were lush, but even for a band this well-acquainted with negative space, Piecework feels almost provocatively unadorned.
The naked production of the album, which was engineered and mixed by Evans, ensures that every note hits with full force. In this corner of heavy music, the finer details of riffs are often swallowed in squalls of feedback and noise. Evans and co-guitarist Jon Howell seek clarity throughout Piecework’s concise 32 minutes. Their twisting interplay is fully audible even in the loudest moments. As “You Had a Plan” swells to its frantic finale, one guitar holds down the main riff while the other splashes an expressionistic solo atop it. Both guitar parts ring out, crystal clear, into the darkness.
As vividly defined as the instruments are, Evans takes a more impressionistic approach as a lyricist. “She chews the air silently/And through the haze, like a pulse, you sing,” he intones on “Splicing,” invoking one of the album’s many unnamed characters. There’s something tantalizing and just out of reach about Evans’ vignettes, a thrilling contrast to the concrete sound of the music. Even the relatively direct title track, which Evans has said was inspired by his grandmother’s decades-long career sewing shirt collars, defies easy analysis: “Stars shine through tin on plaster/Straight arms won’t stop the world.”
The lyrics were the final element to fall into place for Piecework, the result of a nasty bout of writer’s block that left Evans staring at a blank page for over a year. “Part of that was me wondering, does anyone even need to hear from me? Maybe we should call this. Nobody needs to hear another middle-aged white dude yelling,” Evans told Treble earlier this month. Whether through self-awareness or self-doubt, that neurosis led to the longest gestation period in Kowloon Walled City’s discography: Piecework comes six years after Grievances, a break twice as long as any previous interim between albums. The agony of that gap is palpable in the music. Evans and his bandmates sound wearied by the act of creation, like each riff and drum fill is being extracted at the cost of some of their vitality. But even when the music feels emotionally draining, it lurches forward, stumbling toward catharsis. The stars shine through.
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