Kowloon Walled City – Turk Street

  

An actual picture of a real drawing of the city.

What’s in a name? Despite – or perhaps because of – the hundreds of names a band will float before settling on the correct moniker, it seems that little attention is ever payed to the name of a band in relation to its music. Sure, in certain cases there is a mythology or musical relevance to the name (Led Zeppelin), but band names are more frequently abstract, or even dictated by a label or manager (The Who). Consider for a second the most famous band name of all time: The Beatles. The history of the band and their music defines the name, rather than vice versa. It’s completely separates from both the hokey pun or genuinely creepy insect it comes from. Metal band names are genuinely a little more opaque in their significance – wouldn’t Slayer or Metallica or Refused be badass names, regardless of which band dons them?*

 

This brings us to the name at hand: Kowloon Walled City. It’s a righteous name regardless of the meaning, but dig a little deeper you find it’s a fair analogue for the music. The city was a fortress of poorly assembled buildings, reaching up to fourteen stories high. It was a haven for the lawless, and the densest city in the world before it was destroyed; narrow streets within it were lit with fluorescent lights and passages through it were labyrinthine and unnavigable.

Kowloon Walled City’s Turk Street echoes the band’s namesake with massive, claustrophobic sound and guitars so dark and sludgy they sound as if they were scooped from the sewers of the city. Tones stretch between a rumbling dirge to down-tuned howls, bending into teeth-grinding pauses. Percussion is restricted to sparse, massive beats, played with the perfect amount of tension-building restraint, barely hanging on to the back end of the beat. As you might expect, the whole palette of black and blue is striped with intensely hoarse, bug-eyed screams.

The production on the record is similar to that from the Akimbo album reviewed a few days ago: intensely loud and unabashedly naked. Even on my earbuds in the subway, the record rattled my brain – it’s not loud in the condensed phony way of a lot of modern records, but a band-playing-in-my-garage-full-volume loud.** The instruments are perfectly defined, and Turk City sounds awesome.

That said, the record isn’t exactly revolutionary. It follows in the sludge tradition of monolithic, slowly unfolding riffs and measured, thunderous drums. But if they’re following any kind of guide, Kowloon Walled City is hitting all the right notes, starting with their name and ending with the lopsided, tumbling songs and their enormous sound.

Rating: 2%***

 

You can download the album for free on their website, or buy their vinyl for $10.

*It’s a rhetorical question, but the rhetorical answer would be “hell yeah!”

**Maybe it’s just the last few albums I’ve heard, but metal albums have the best production in the world. Even indie records sound thin or imbalanced or blindingly glossy in comparison.

***On the milk scale. I’m pretty hesitant to use transparent ratings, because it would become pretty obvious that I really, really like most of that albums I review here. After all, it’s hard to get motivated to write about terrible crap, of which there’s plenty. Look for some horrible, worthless bands to be featured in the coming days/weeks/months.

Intronaut – Prehistoricisms

 

The same cover as Abraxas, by Santana? No.

Jazz-metal bass: bright, brilliant, slinking through the mix as only the grooviest, sexiest basses can slink. Bass solos that make you stand up and stutter, “b-b-b-bass solos?” Bass that was, according to legend, the same played to reightous effect on Paul Simon’s Graceland. Bass so funkily throbbing that it takes a little while to realize how perfectly it fits in with Intronaut’s lumbering, bone-crushing heaviness.

But as the mighty Lemmy hath slurred, “man cannot live by bass alone,” and the other half of the rhythm section certainly takes that saying to heart. In a genre overflowing with technically prodigious musicians, Intronaut has a drummer who plays like some manic octopus, or at least a jointly-brained siamese twin. Polyrhythms roll across toms and stutter through cymbals, double-bass by turns stampedes and pirouettes, all the while feeling complimentary rather than overpowering. Well, except for a fierce, tribal drum solo that caroms through the center of “Any Port.” Guitars that, while not getting some overblown, fanatical praise, certainly do no disservice to the rest of the band.

 Intronaut keeps you off balance with constant thrusts and jabs, and writes songs layered with musicians both sympathetic to each other and quite capable, comopositionally. At their worst, jazz expeditions begin to drag, and their rythmic complexities become the end rather than the means to songwriting. But those crimes are petty larceny – or at the most, indecent exposure – coming from a band that continues to push it’s music boundaries without compromising their ball-smashing heaviness.

If you’re really so cool, go listen to it on MySpace, cause I can’t imbed it.

*Oh, I should also mention the sixteen-minute Ravi-Shankar sub-continental jazz explosion in the closing track, “The Reptilian Brain.” Because it’s good, you see!

**Also, whatever’s next will be ten-million percent less hyperbolic.