Reviews list for Kowloon Walled City - Piecework (2021)

It was purely the artwork that drew me to Kowloon Walled City’s Piecework. As a fan of abandoned buildings/places, the bleak and (literally) damp décor of the room on the cover of the bands fourth full-length release was enough to pique my interest levels as my mind began to wonder what history had taken place in that room. Often with such images I like to envisage the lives of those that had lived there, be intrigued by the years that had unfolded there, lament in its current empty and uncertain state.

There is by way of contrast no uncertainty in the album content. Setting an early standard, the band remain almost static throughout the album. Drifting through the seven tracks on display here at virtually the same pace of post-sludgey goodness, contemplating urban decay (which is a common theme across the band’s discography) and as such making a perfect correlation back to that artwork that first drew me in.

In exploring this theme, the band create an almost nonchalant demeanour in weighing up the subject matter. Never crashing and bashing, always calculated and poised in their delivery, the four-piece exude a maturity to their gritty and deep content that although rarely varies never gets boring. What Kowloon Walled City manage to do on Piecework is build instantly and then maintain a direction that becomes the absolute spine of the album. Most tracks do sound the same and the album tracks do all tend to blur into one. However, I cannot remember one other album in recent years where this linearity is so utterly perfectly placed (and paced). This fusion of the tracks (in my head at least) really works in making the album so successful in relaying its message. It is an album that is not adorned in any way, shape, or form with anything unnecessary or surplus. It turns up to the party with its own keg of home-brewed beer and sits, supping from its own mixture – offering pint pots of it to anyone who expresses interest, whilst acknowledging it is perhaps an acquired taste.

This stasis, the basis of the repetition and the lynchpin to the constant brooding of the album, is exactly what is needed. The inflections of intrusive and yet utterly necessary bass riffs, set against the constant swell of the melodic and yet relentlessly staid guitars, sat atop the consistent percussion of the drums, layered with Scott Evans barely charged vocals that just exude a natural sorrow all makes for a unique and strangely comforting album. The drama comes with those hanging pauses that leave you on the edge of your seat waiting for the heaviness to commence again, never quite sure if this is the end of a track or midway into the first verse of one.

In a way, Piecework embraces and epitomises urban decay as a natural and unwavering force that they manage to celebrate as a concept to some degree. As I look out of my window whilst listening to the album, into a wet and slowly darkening late Saturday afternoon, the album content seems a world away from my surroundings. However, by being so clever at painting the picture they do, that room on the album cover might just as well be down the landing.