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28
August
2009 |
tags: Salem. |
It seems everyone’s having the same day today-gloomy, rainy, wet. Emotionally exhausting, good feelings evaporating into graying mist.
As such: Salem’s new video, Skullcrush
I know Cold Cave are this year’s band the sad-eyed girls listen to, but Salem is still where you go when you have real problems and the only way out is down.
(R.I.P. Dr Shlomo Zelig)
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06
March
2009 |
tags: live review, Salem. |
Dr. Shlomo Zelig, Born July 20, 1979, died at 10:59 PM on March 4, 2009 on assignment for Resonator Magazine. As a frequent cited member of the Res Mag “Away Team”, Zelig oft participated in various “live-blogging” events such as Resonator’s innovative “Grammy LiveBlog”, the first of which kicked off a trend of such events being done to a lesser degree of skill by various other music and culture blogs. Zelig’s fondness for dark, obscure and obscene techno, as well as the dirty “ghetto” music of the southern U.S., caused him to instantly fall in love with mysterious, up-and-coming goth-tech-crunk duo SALEM. Assigned to cover their recently released WATER E.P., Zelig, under unknown circumstances, found himself in amongst the highly-selective invitees to a rare live performance by SALEM to celebrate the E.P.’s release. The performance, which took place in a small venue in Salem village, just outside the historic city of Salem, Mass (30 minutes north of Boston), would be the last time any would encounter Zelig alive. Zelig was found, in the morning light, dead of carbon monoxide poisoning inside the venue, along with about 50 others. Police reports on the event have ranged from baffled confusion to outright angered lunacy at the mysterious circumstances regarding the mass poisoning.
Dr. Shlomo Zelig’s twitter feed serves as our only documentation to what occurred in Salem, Mass on the night he witnessed what must have been a once-in-a-lifetime live performance. Zelig’s twitter documentation can be found here, and should be read, for chronology’s sake, from the bottom up-exactly as Zelig lived his life.
SALEM could not be reached for comment.
We dedicate SALEM’s “Skullcrush”, the second song on SALEM’s Water E.P. to our fallen comrade Dr. Zelig, as we continue to piece together what happened on this fateful night.
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There is absolutely no stopping the ways in which both my brain and my heart warp, melt, shiver and collapse each time a Salem song starts. It’s phenomenal that, in the short time that they’ve been actually in my frame of consciousness, they have become both a standard and a trademark. Fear-inducing, nail-biting low-end with chopped-and-screwed melodies and a toss-up of either the sweetest, lucid female vocals or the most menacing, destructive goblin-in-the-night-to-rape-your-children voice possible. A completely original and at-times-unpalatable sound that just may become a touchstone of something new entirely.
Anyway, Salem, via Merok Records, has a new EP, Water
Unlike Animal Collective’s similarly-named 2008 E.P. ,these four song are all actually curses, plagues and poxes on your nightmares and dreamscapes that suck you in and spit you out, raw and bleeding and begging for more. Audio nihilism? Yes, please, and more, please, and thank you yes I do like it, please, like that, please.
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A pornographic nightstory bedfable that conjures, in my head, images of the heavy-lidded Laura Palmer pouting her red lips.
Pin yourself down and trap yourself in a room with this, in the dark, and see if you don’t reach a new level of existing.
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11
September
2008 |
tags: Salem. |
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.
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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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