King Night

King Night, accordingly, finds Salem pushing their sound far enough to create artistic distance from the rest of the pack.

Played loud, King Night is a widescreen hallucinogen. [Oct 2010, p.104]

It's been a hella long time coming and may, ultimately, be about as soul curdling as Sabrina the Teenage Witch, but Salem's first blood King Night is still an enjoyably daft crypt kicker.

Exhilarating end-of-days from the US trio. [Oct. 2010, p. 113]

King Night is sick. Not just in the sense that it's outstandingly good but in the fact that it seems extremely unwell.

With a backstory that includes gas-station hooking and heroin addiction, Michigan electro-extremists Salem are spooky straightaway. Then their quicksand sound sucks you down.

By creating a world so comic-book vivid, each track stands and walks in its own desolate, saturnine world. But it's a world where the dead want to be alive and the alive would rather be dead. The creation of warped minds, Salem just made a monster.

Salem deal in fragments and ambiguities; their music is unmistakably dark, in all the senses above and more, and saps power from the tension they set up between reality and dream. But there's light and beauty there too.

The rest of King Night is, for the most part, similarly forgettable.

Seedy, feel-bad music. Half-dead, sometimes gorgeous, and willfully dumb beyond repair. Call it alienation porn. Sound awful? Well, it is kind of awful--and rivetingly so.

Rave horns echo like WW2 sirens being played on a fucked-up ghetto blaster while the cast of House Of 1000 Corpses do their best Gucci Mane impressions--an interesting, if perhaps slightly contrived, oddity.

This is not a one-hit wonder situation, or even an album with only one good song. With King Night, Salem exhausts all its resources in a singular moment, which leaves the rest of the record to suffer through its own paralysis and mediocrity.

As the Chicagoan trio defines it on their debut album King Night, witch-house is a curious blend of aesthetics.

They might be unreliable performers, but their studio work is forward-thinking and beautiful in an oddly satisfying, downtrodden way.

Their debut album King Night defies genre tagging and, for once, lives up to the drooling media accolades already smeared on it. [Dec 2010, p.54]

Whether or not you think antipathy and self-destruction are legitimate themes for music, or you feel that even the pretty remote handling of rap that Salem has done as three white kids is too much, you can't dismiss what started all this hub-bub in the first place: the fact that the trio has crafted a sound that still doesn't really sound like anything else. Whatever else it does, King Night stays true to that.

For all the calculated horror show element, much of King Night is very pretty and nuanced, trading in shivering beauty rather than infernal fury, with an aching world weariness running Marlatt and Holland's more lucid vocal turns. It's just a shame Donoghue has to dopily blunder in there every now and again, the dimwit henchman to his evil scientist colleagues.

With less vocals, more warp and looser production, it's a witchier, Midwestern answer to its London, dub-driven predecessors.

Salem evokes the seismic thrill of a good Gucci drop alongside all of Nico's ghostly beauty within the very framework and timbre of their productions. The result is no less than one of 2010's most exciting debuts.

The songs on this debut album are lethargic, syrupy, and sinister, with the rough-edged peaks of a maxed-out mix.