Salem - King Night

Hey, it's me.

I've finally gotten around to actually making new posts almost every day, how exciting! I feel like over the past few months my writing capabilities have greatly increased. Partly because I've been taking writing courses in school which resulted in me writing a lot more, but also because I've been reading and writing a lot of reviews, so the quality (in my opinion), and quantity of my posts have increased. I can now write a whole review in the time that it took me to write a brief bio for a band in one paragraph. Turns out writing more makes you better at it, who knew?

The album we have here is Salem's debut album "King Night". Salem is an electronic trio from Traverse City, Michigan. They have been garnering a lot of hype with this album because of the band's unique combination of electronic and shoegaze with dirty south rap, resulting in the creation of what could possibly be the most unusual genre of music I've seriously ever seen in my entire life: Witch House (also known as Crunk Shoegaze). In theory, this new style of music seems like it would sound like shit, but you'd be surprised at how differently you'd think it would sound prior to actually listening to songs of said genre.

I actually really enjoyed the first track on the album "King Night", which is also the title of the album, and it gave me a really good first impression on what to expect for the rest of the album: dark, gloomy, atmospheric electronic music backed by what sounds like opera singing, and if the rest of the album sounded like this I'd think they'd really have something going for them. The following tracks "Asia" and "Frost" also really impressed me, keeping to the same characteristics maintained on the first track, with Frost even having some swirly, hollow female singing that really made that particular track that much spookier.

Then it happened. I got to the fourth track "Sick", and I heard those sampled "Yeeuhs" found at the beginning of any hip hop song, only they were slowed down, and then some slowed down, deep voice started rapping over the track, and that's where the album died. The fact that they slowed it down a lot did make it sound a little better as it gave it a sort of more horrifying sound, but it still doesn't change the fact that they just had to throw some rap in there. At first I hated it like sickness, but since I listened to it over and over for the sake of reviewing, I started to like it more and more. So if you don't like it at first, you might like it after a few listens.

I think most of the tracks on this album would kill at a Halloween party, and this album should definitely be on your autumn playlist. I don't think it'll be much of a spring/summer album though, so enjoy it now!

8/10

(I had to take the download link down, the record company complained to blogspot, perhaps it's a sign you should purchase the album instead!)