Despite the fraught hostility coursing through the first two albums from San Francisco Sludge quartet Kowloon Walled City, there was evidence of a Post-hardcore sensibility. It’s no surprise, therefore, to see a heightening of the band’s melody on third album Grievances (Neurot).
Brief flurries of lead are evident from the outset, but so is a slow pace; Ian Miller’s rumbling bass, especially throughout tolling closer ‘Daughters and Sons’; and Scott Evans’ embittered yell. What opener ‘Your Best Years’ misses in urgency and frenetic neurosis, it gains in feeling and an almost unbearable tension: sections where brakes are applied evoke scenes of tethered wild animals straining to be free. The ensuing title track has the same doleful, stone-kicking pace: violent desires suffocated by a Doom-like oppression which leaves every synapse twitching with the harrowing drama of it all. When the explosion occurs at the track’s midway point, it too is sufficiently reined to maximise its powerful statement. Less, here, is more…
It is this skill which Kowloon Walled City possess in buckets: the ability to move further toward the more touching, tortured elements of Touché Amoré without sacrificing their own aggravated, pummelling core. Timing, especially with the introduction of Evans’ vocal, is immaculate and delivered to optimum effect with always a word left out there hanging past the instrumentation: the “Weaknesses…” refrain to ‘Backlit’ is positively chilling. Yet it all feels so organic, a fluid part of the breathing whole.
That anger is occasionally allowed its freedom, within the crashing ire of ‘The Grift’ for example, yet it remains tempered by a complexity of sound: the guilt after lashing out which even the tweak of strings at the track’s coda highlights. This is the embodiment of pure expression: an album depicting a person with so much justified anger, yet is too nice to show it or feels like shit when they do. An album fizzing with pain and frustration yet constantly, feverishly, grasping at its reins for fear of what could happen if let loose. The pregnant ‘True Believer’ epitomises this fragile balance: a squall of pent-up hurt and aggression which flays the skin when the bubble pops.
Grievances is an at times unsettling and traumatic but always potent experience, blowing this year’s closest relative, Black Sheep Wall’s I’m Going to Kill Myself (Season of Mist), from the water by more accurately personalising the rawness and unpredictability of suppressed emotion.
8.5/10.0
PAUL QUINN