Kowloon Walled City: Grievances

No one but a person who’d experienced abject powerlessness and the passive acceptance of degradation could have created Grievances. It’s the third full-length by San Francisco’s Kowloon Walled City, a post-metal group that Scott Evans fronts as both singer/guitarist and producer. Wearing that many hats in a band suggests a position of authority, but you’d never guess that listening to Grievances. Evans subsumes his riffs within vast, oppressive swathes of empty space. He submits his voice to a process of industrialized monotony. His guitar doesn’t gently weep—it curls up, plays dead, and still isn’t able to halt its cataclysmic spasms.

Yet Grievances sounds anything but weak. Kowloon’s last album, 2012’s Container Ships, showed a shift toward refinement that felt more like a half measure, but here, Evans and crew have hit on something profound. It isn’t a concept album per se, but it does have an overarching theme: the psychic, social, and spatial anxieties of the modern workplace. But Grievances isn’t about run-of-the-mill disgruntled employment as much as it’s a haunting meditation on humanity’s disassociation from the product—or, in our increasingly cyber-centric world, the service—of its labor.

"You sell it like a poet," Evans howls on "The Grift", the centerpiece and high point of the album. It’s an accusation of self-commodification, seemingly aimed both inward and outward. It’s more than that, though; as a trainwreck of AmRep-style noise rock is sculpted into minimalist shapes, that structure becomes a metaphor for hollowness of all kinds. "The fiction sells," Evans reiterates, and when he slams the "confidence game" of modern interpersonal commerce, his sardonic use of "confidence" is even more lacerating than his sly insinuation of melody.

At just over three and a half minutes, "The Grift" is the runt of the album. Song lengths stretch onward from there, including Grievances’ title track, which crawls along for nearly seven minutes’ worth of forlorn rage. While Evans levels the charge "No love/ No memory/ Just admit it", fellow guitarist Jon Howell locks into a pneumatic, dehumanized groove that sputters out in gasps of dead air. Bassist Ian Miller chugs and claws; drummer Jeff Fagundes (replaced by Julia Lancer since this recording) puts the brakes on spacetime. If Godflesh and Codeine had ever conspired to hybridize, it might have come out like this: bleak but bare, mechanistic yet melancholic.

Grievances is inalienably heavy, but it’s not sludge in the conventional sense. On "Your Best Years", the distortion is more clotted than fuzzy, with immaculate slabs of dissonance left dangling overhead. But it’s "Backlit" that sums up the huge step forward Kowloon has taken with Grievances. Arid and static at first, it builds into a monument to grim resignation that feels weathered and ancient right out of the gate. "Wear out your weaknesses," Evans half-commands, half-implores; later he adds, "Wear all your weaknesses." Resistance is futile, but in that steadfast futility there is strength.