SALEM - King Night

SALEM - King Night (Iamsound) Comentários: Truly EPIC debut album from unavoidable Drag/Witch-House protagonists, Salem - quite easily the years most exhilarating listen. Since 2008 this trio have been spiking the sewers of pop with prescribed doses of scarily prescient ghettogothic crunk on Acephalé and Merok records, inventing one of the most spellbinding modern genres in the process. They're a tiding of ghoulish pop magpies, accepting of all that is good and grimy about ubiquitous mainstream saturation and robosexual R'n'B, absorbing and filtering their most unheimlich elements and enhancing them with a blank-eyed Shoegaze aesthetic, wickedly exaggerating and distorting their features until they leer back with overwhelming intensity, simultaneously creating one of the most oppressing and liberated sounds you've heard in years. Their vision and influence has spawned a coven of scattered, yet like-minded operators in Hype Williams, Balam Acab and oOoOO among others, finding kindred spirits in the affective potential of chopped and screwed rap and classic 4AD feelings, cutting past any ironic bullsh*t to acutely fulfill the needs of a generation searching for viscerally psyched, tactile "experiences". Following a tiny handful of 7"s, 'King Night' is their defining statement, eleven tracks of devastating, slo-mo MPC drum fills worthy of Araab Music, fused to nuclear synth bursts delivered with an achingly blank insouciance, all smeared in acetone-wet MDMA and left to degrade in a Michigan basement until it's nerves are permanently polarised, fluctuating between extreme, saccharine euphoria and melancholy misanthropy. Inside you'll find the revamped 808-rolling genius of 'Redlights' from their 'Yes, I Smoke Crack' debut 7", the slow nosebleed beauty of 'Traxx', sounding like Seefeel on a codeine overdose, next to the narco-saturated E and E-esque synth saturation of 'Sick', and the supremely uncomfortable MBV intensity of 'Release Of The Boar'. Every time we come back to this album we uncover yet more bewitching, peripheral "what the f*ck was that?!" moments, like where the rhythm seems to slip out of place in 'Frost', (but did it?) or wondering what the hell the drawling rap of "I Can't Feel It/ I Can't Feeeel Sh*t" in 'Trapdoor' is all about. 'King Night' defines the intangibly elusive, illusive, and yet omnipresent contradictions of contemporary pop culture and we can't recommend it any higher. Serious contender for album of the year. in boomkat [Para Ouvir/Samples]