I’m sick today, emotionally and physically. There’s a heavy fog hazing across my vision and I want to curl up in a ball and slowly phase myself out of myself and into some sort of darkened blue-black cloud, between waking and sleeping. It’s a lovely twist of fate, then, that today’s the day I first discover Salem.
I don’t know much about the duo calling themselves Salem. No one does. They have an EP, wondrously titled Yes I Smoke Crack. This EP is mythical and pretty-much nonexistent if you don’t already own it, though, if “Brustreet” is any indication, it could also be called And I Also Inject Tussin. This song is a heady, impossible-to-penetrate swirling maze of a reinterpretation of “Streets of Philadeliphia”, possibly constructed while under the influence of the substances readily available in Philly. If not, at the very least it’s a fitting ode to said narcotics. The vocals sound like Cocteau Twins drowning in a sea of codine, pleading and diving and giving into pleasure.
Then…the pleasure begets pain.
SALEM - DIRT from ACEPHALE on Vimeo.
The video for “Dirt”, a horrific slowed-down crunk song filtered through a gothic 4AD lens, crusted with dried blood and tear-salt, made to terrorize small children at night. This picks up where the goblin-sounds and tinny crystalline forest soundscapes of The Knife last left us, and I don’t throw that comparison around lightly. In fact, if Karin and Olof set out to make a heroin-sweating trunk-rattler of a song, it would be this. And that scares me, because I fear this song the closer it gets to night-time. It’s been forever since a song has me tense, edgy, afraid to breathe, afraid to close my eyes. This has done that, and it’s fantastic.
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