From their inception, Kowloon Walled City associated their seismic sludgy noise rock sound with themes of desolation and decline, lonely and broken vistas; monuments to the dysfunction of humanity. Their debut album
Gambling on the Richter Scale resembles surveying a once-familiar landscape in the wake of unprecedented destruction; with rubbly bass, excavating drums and tinnitusy slashes of feedback, the tracks painstakingly sift through protracted chord progressions and bleak rhythms like a real-time processing of trauma. Hoarse despairing yells, akin to someone who just inhaled a lungful of mortar dust, tie the sound together and come across not as cries for help or calls to the lost but as a sort of delirious coping mechanism.
Despite its concise 36 minute length,
Gambling... takes its time and really torturously dwells on its themes of disorientated exhaustion and (eventual) defeated acceptance. The pace affords their sound a certain hugeness - not necessarily in terms of pure heaviness but in a sense of calculating hopelessly insurmountable odds against rescue. Dismal grooves are unearthed at every turn as the album fixes its cracked and smudged lens on a permanently grey landscape.
While the rugged rhythm section is at the epicentre of the album, Kowloon Walled City take notes from the likes of KEN mode or Today is the Day by diversifying their sound with jagged melodies. Ringing guitar, like light shining down on crumbled ruins, regularly adds brighter though still morose textures such as the winding leads/tremolo that close off "Bone Loss", the wandering picking at the start of "Paper Houses", and the unlikely wistful solo in "Sleep Debt". The higher register of the guitar lines juts from the debris of the low end like twisted beams of rusted metal but much like the album's pacing, such moments demonstrate restraint.
Gambling...'s lyrics can mostly only be pieced together in fragments, the standout lines aren't preachy or even angry but typically in the tone of understated reflection and fatalism - "You never felt guilt", You worked so hard", "This is all we have".
For an album that could have been far more blunt,
Gambling... has a degree of subtlety that leaves an enjoyable amount of dots for the listener to connect. There is no hope of recovery from the wreckage though, this is a staunchly despairing experience and not for those who prefer a happy ending.
