ALBUM REVIEW: Piecework – Kowloon Walled City

While we’ve all experienced a little time dilation over the last two years, it seems impossible that we haven’t heard from Oakland riff raiders KOWLOON WALLED CITY since 2015’s cinderblock of grunt and groove, Grievances. They’ve spent the intervening years taking their formula of masterful light and shade, tension and release dynamics back to the grindstone, deliberately paring back to their elementary components for compelling results now presented on Piecework.

Gone is the roiling, leaden heft of some of their previous production – Ian Miller’s bass has been especially dialled back, reducing that scene-stealing, industrial equipment growl. Gone too are the lengthy, glacial compositions – this record weighs in at just over 30 minutes. What remains is KOWLOON WALLED CITY at the genetic level.

Like a photograph, Piecework captures the full gamut of human emotional experience in its half-hour runtime – vulnerability, triumph, rage, frustration, faint hope, and acceptance are all here in the unhurried, considered and stripped down songs. While not a huge departure from the band’s well-worn dynamic sound, the four-piece have spent 15 years capturing and defining this voice, so why go to the trouble of fixing what isn’t broken? Not for them is shifting sound to chase approval and affection, just an earnest, workmanlike evolution towards their own goal.

And, in all their paring back and conscious uncoupling, this is the closest to that goal we may have heard from KOWLOON WALLED CITY yet. From the ringing chords of the opening moments of the title track, through the shuddering atonality of Utopian, the beautiful, melancholic chiming and harmonics of Oxygen Tent, and the syrupy slowness of You Had A Plan (which opens like the dawning realisation of waking up to a cinder-block level hangover), this is pure and uncut, classic KOWLOON WALLED CITY – the hallmarks are all here, but buffed to a black-mirrored shine.

While not as frantically pacey as the Turk Street or Gambling On The Richter Scale years, taking more of an unhurried, deliberate pace, this record still sees the band knuckling down to produce irresistible, inexorably driving sections that flex their muscles to inure an uncomplicated rhythmic current. When We Fall Through The Floor is one of the band’s most engaging explorations of negative space, tension and release to date, and closer Lampblack delivers the wearied, cathartic triumph that is the band’s truest trademark.

Throughout the album, we see examples of the band’s confessional, honest lyricism. Backed by Scott Evans’ ragged, mournful, frustrated shouts, there’s a diarised, blue-collar Americana about the words and images here, of life, love, and loss. You won’t find the ephemeral ‘sky meets earth’ of labelmates NEUROSIS’ pictogram lyrics here, but you will find something universal and relatable, observational, honest, born of lived experience and hard years.

With Piecework, KOWLOON WALLED CITY have – knowingly or not – produced what could be the soundtrack to our current times. It is the regret of Sunday mornings after Saturday nights when we’re old enough to know better. It is the heartache and frustrations of Tuesday evening burn out, wondering what the point of it all is. It is dreary, despairing, but beautiful life – the sound of a life where we don’t know where we fit any more, or where things are leading, but we must trudge wearily on, with hope, towards better days.

Rating: 8/10

Piecework is set for release on October 8th via Neurot Recordings.

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