Kowloon Walled City – Piecework (Review)

This is the fourth album from US sludge metal band Kowloon Walled City.

It seems like a long time since Grievances saw the light of day in 2015. The band have now returned with Piecework, their shortest and most refined album to date.

Across 33 minutes the band ply their sludgy trade, which combines influences from doom, noise rock, and post-metal into seven sludge metal tracks that put the best sides of the band forward. The music is stripped back and portrays the core of what Kowloon Walled City are all about; this is raw, emotive, and unadorned.

The songs feel barren and bleak, but also nuanced and rich. Kowloon Walled City manage to do a very lot with a very little. Sometimes the spaces between the notes are just as important as the distorted guitars. The songs frequently seem to fall off at key moments, dropping into delicate quiet ambience, before once again gathering the strength and the will to burst into restrained heaviness and thunderous drums.

I’ve always had a soft spot for this band, and Piecework reminds me why I enjoy their work so much. The songs are simply well-written and idiosyncratic examples of honest heavy music, played with passion and brimming with feeling. You can’t really ask for more than that.

Very highly recommended.