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Kowloon Walled City performs tonightā€”Friday, November 6ā€”at Black Water Bar (835 NE Broadway) with Sloths, Fight Amp, and Hang the Old Year. All ages.

In the space of three albums and a handful of splits and singles, Kowloon Walled City have grown from a twisted Amphetamine Reptile-indebted noise-rock group into a sparse, sludgy behemoth all their own. Despair and fragility color every song, and if you've seen a Kowloon Walled City album cover, you'll know those colors add up to a morass of gray and black.

Scott Evans, speaking from his California home, where he spends his days programming, discusses the consciousness of the band's transition from feral machine to a sparse, deeply human sprawl. "For the first few years we were just doing a thing," Evans tells meā€”their thing being a deep worship of Godflesh, Unsane, and simple guitar rigs, among other things. "After you've done that thing for so long, you kind of look and say, 'Well, this is our thing.'" Like the Clash's London Calling, Fugazi's In on the Kill Taker, or Sleater-Kinney's Dig Me Out, Grievances is the sound of a band taking stock of their lessons learned and turning those into a stunning new vocabulary.

Evans is a naturally curious manā€”the first thing we do in our interview is figure out why Skype audio calls only stream through the right speaker of our MacBooks (the microphone is near the left speaker and would induce feedback otherwise, we deduce). His curiosity leads him through multiple pursuits as recording engineer, programmer, and family man. Kowloon Walled City's records sound drabā€”the drums thud, the guitars chime, and his vocals barely tear over the instrumentationā€”but the effect is monstrous. Evans maintains that his recording practices are "not philosophically based." Instead, he argues his aim in recording is to "provide the right illusion."

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