Kowloon Walled City - Turk Street
So I've been fucking busy lately, hence, little in the way of updates. I saw Amon Amarth, Ensiferum, Belphegor, and The Asbence, which kicked ass, I had a whole bunch of shit to do for school, and a presentation to give at a conference. I'm back, now, though, with a slightly more open schedule, and I'm going to give a quick review to Kowloon Walled City's "Turk Street" EP.
I tend to be big fan of raw done right. There's the shitty way to do raw, where its really just a bad recording, and then there's the awesome way to do raw, where the record is designed to sound like a trainwreck. It's like the difference between St. Anger and Earth A.D. Done right, your raw sounding record becomes the template for all future hardcore. Done wrong, your raw sounding record becomes a bad punchline for aging metalheads.
Kowloon Walled City does raw about as right as it can be done.
The band recorded their debut EP, "Turk Street," themselves, but I can't imagine anyone else doing them more justice. I've seen this EP compared to the Melvins a few times, but frankly I personally think the Melvins are a little too good in a bad way to be compared to this. I would argue that Kowloon Walled City are really in the tradition of that sound that happened in the late 90s when hardcore kids discovered heavy music. Bands like Jesuit and Coalesce upped the noise ante without losing any of the sort of anti-rock urgency that makes hardcore what it is.
Kowloon Walled City pull that sound off beautifully. They're noisy, raw, and urgent, with harsh, shrieked vocals, but they also carry a pretty thick low end. They're a real great combination of the kind of raw noise of the above mentioned bands mixed with a sort of modern stoner/sludge thing. I really dig it.
On top of all of that, you can download the EP for free at their website. I'm going to strongly suggest you head over right now and check it out. You really aren't going to find a better deal for the price, right? So download the EP and keep your eyes out for any future releases.
Thank you so much for this review. This album is hands down my favorite release since Cursed III, and might I mention with the aforementioned band being permanently disbanded that there need to be a lot more bands like Kowloon to pick up the slack in that genre. I also really got into that VAKA album you just reviewed. It's like Neurosis met the entire line up of 70's piano rock bands and they all collaborated on a truly listenable album. keep up the good work you two. -Rob
login or register to post comments Submitted by RobertStroud on Mon, 2009-02-16 04:16.