Salem – ‘Redlights’

Salem haven’t been around long, but already they’ve made a lasting impression on American underground music.

The trio’s early 7” singles, which sold out within weeks, combined chopped and screwed hip-hop with stripped-down drum machines and the sort of static-saturated melodies that would make any shoegazer turn their eyes upwards. Call it an inverse Cocteau Twins, call it a modern Big Black, whatever – Salem were one of few bands around doing something genuinely new, and fast-forward a couple of years, and they’ve influenced a whole wave of artists, generally bracketed into the “drag” or “witch house” brackets.

This month, the band – John Holland, Heather Marlatt and Jack Donoghue – will release their debut album, King Night. Eleven tracks long and described by Acephale Records, who put out Salem’s first EP as “impossibly heavy”, it finds them upping the noise and distortion, updating past tracks with additional hardware (wait ‘til you hear the 808-fuelled remix of ‘Redlights’), and rapping more, and crucially, better. It’s everything you’d expect from a Salem full-length, but still holds surprises, particularly on its glistening closing track ‘Killer’.

FACT spoke last week to the band, via conference call, to discuss drag, hip-hop, the visual side of Salem and more.

How do you guys feel having finished this new LP?

John: “It’s cool. Like uh… We weren’t really… It’s not like we sat down and recorded it. It’s more like it was in the works for two years now.”

So did you all just compile these tracks or did you sort of remake alot of older material?

John: “There’s like songs from like a long time and songs made recently that we just sort of put together. Some of them we had to redo, we wanted them to be like, in terms of the sound quality, a bit coherent with the rest of the album.”

What about the last track, ‘Killer’? It has a different feel than the rest of the album to me. Is this track something of a new direction?

John: “Uh, thats actually an older song. I think the difference is just that it has a lot of guitars where as most of the others have lots of synthesizers. It’s one of the songs we recorded back in 2008 or 2009 or something.”

“We just made music that we weren’t hearing, because why make music that you can already hear?”

I think the reason that that track might also stand out is because it doesn’t seem to have a lot of distortion like the other tracks do. Do you guys kind of use distortion as an instrument?

John: “I think it’s just another layer of the sound pretty much.”

It’s not like adding a layer of meaninful dimension then?

John: “No it’s just like… you know, just part of how the sounds come together.”

How do you feel about people claiming that you all pretty much started a genre or sound? Or do you feel that what people would call “drag” or “witch house” has no real relation to anything you do?

Heather: “There wasn’t like a lot of people making music like our music when we started. But it wasnt like we were like ‘we’re going to start this thing’, you know?”

Jack: “We just made music that we weren’t hearing, because why make music that you can already hear?”

John: “Also we weren’t making a conscious decision to do anything, we were just making music that we were making.”

Jack: “I just don’t think we would be interested in trying to make something that was already accessible to us. We were trying to make music we were trying to listen to.”

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