Salem

I liked the band Salem, until I saw them live.

The zoned out trio from suburban Michigan made an appearance at Wrongbar this past St. Patrick’s Day. Salem lives up to the “screwgaze” genre, a sound that incorporates shoegaze and Dirty South down-tempo rap in a fuzzy, low-quality style. This sound comes with spacey, Pagan, VHS-inspired imagery. Think tasteless acid wash Cheap Monday jeans, Christopher Kane graphic tees, and Japanese avant-garde in a graveyard. Maybe what’s so great about Salem is that they bring all sorts of people together under the guise of nostalgic weirdness.

The opening band Silk Flowers was strictly an embarrassment to music. I thought the days of trying to sound like Ian Curtis were over. There’s only one Joy Division, and nobody can replicate them. Nice try, Silk Flowers.

Finally, Salem painfully hit the stage at 12:20 a.m. Their ominous “witch house” sound was complimented by a fog machine that went off approximately five times within the first 30 minutes of the set.  The band opened with their hip-hop-influenced tunes and slowed down with Heather Marlatt’s vocals. I felt like a jaundiced prostitute melting into a puddle of repetitious noise the entire time.

I’ll give kudos to Salem for performing the title track from their full-length record, King Night, but other songs such as “Asia” sounded like a mess, and any songs with rapping in them like “Sick” and “Trapdoor” felt off-beat, with inauthentic and boring lyrics muddled amidst the smoky synth and heavy drum machine.

The awful smell of the fog machine was enough to make me leave early, but the coked out, moshing crowd pushed me over the edge. Regardless of feeling nauseous and irritated, Salem was a major letdown, a total disappointment in the face of a fascinating and pioneering genre.

The show killed any further curiosity of mine for Salem’s music.  I am reminded of an experience I had at a Presets show at the Mod Club in 2009: the pushy, bewildered crowd was bad enough to turn me away from the Presets’ music forever. On the way home, I listened to real hip hop – Jurassic 5. I had to cleanse my palette somehow, and forget about “King Night.”

More photos of Salem here!