Albums of the Day: Premonitions of War’s Left in Kowloon and Glorified Dirt/The True Face of Panic
When working on my Kowloon Walled City review, I couldn’t help being reminded of Left in Kowloon, Premonitions of War’s excellent Victory debut. Then came a moment of stomach-sinking horror: I had no Premonitions of War on my iPod. This was due to the incident which took my first model: I was out for a run one sort of overcast day, and then, out of nowhere while listening to “I’d Settle for Sleep”, the sky opened the fuck up and I was drenched within ten seconds. I angled my hand so my iPod wouldn’t get the brunt of the rain, but about a minute and a half later, the music stopped. When I got to a dry area, I turned it back on to see if it was still working. Come to find out, shockingly, that iPods aren’t fond of getting wet. Everything on it had been erased, and later, I’d discover that I couldn’t load anything back onto it. There’s not an incident in my life—that’s actually happened to me or I’ve heard about second- or fiftieth-hand—that’s been quite as heartbreaking. Except Darfur or the Holocaust or theBlackPlagueortheRapeofNankingorRwandaorWorldWarIblahblahblahetc. or fucking whatever.
But I still love Premonitions of War, so I can only assume I subconsciously never re-acquired their albums due to some superstition that I’d have to pay off another mp3 player if I listened to them again. Needless to say, I ankled that right quick in the last week and grabbed both Kowloon and the band’s last few Nate Johnson-helmed releases. And man, this band holds up fantastically well. With metalcore at an age where it may be susceptible to the saccharine charms of nostalgia, there’s no rosy glasses necessary for Premonitions of War. They’re just as lean and fierce as they were back in the early part of the last decade.
Left in Kowloon is the album that’s most often namechecked when PoW is referenced, and with good cause. It’s a fine documentation of the intersection between grind and beefy, breakdown-heavy hardcore without venturing too far into either. The production’s appealingly slick and the band roll out 10 scrappy, vicious songs and two relatively longer numbers—a five-minute noise piece and “Black Den,”a song that features perhaps the longest mosh call ever followed up by a sliver of a payoff. Glorified Dirt/The True Face of Panic, the band’s (sadly) latest release, is the heavier of the two, wrapped in gritty, raw production and the band adjusting to Johnson’s presence. They were sharper and meaner, having no qualms with turning off potential fans with an unsanitary bunch of muddy hardcore songs. Pretty much anything the band did—even their bizarrely cover-heavy split with Benumb—is worth checking out. So help me God, I’m never losing this band again. Until it rains unexpectedly. Then they owe me an iPod Touch.
