found
this review from
Boomkat from 2010, interestingly King Night was their
#2 album of 2010:
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.
Piccadilly Records
https://web.archive.org/web/20101016070 ... 72446.html
Emerging in in 2008 with the woozily scary EP "Yes I Smoke Crack", Michigan trio John Holland, Heather Marlatt and Jack Donoghue have gone on to spearhead a new sound in US music which has been labelled 'witch house', 'ghost step' or 'drag'. It's not certain what this dark electronica mutated from, but clearly dubstep, crunk style hip hop and juke / footwork could all be decoded in the Salem DNA string. "King Night" has a brooding presence, with the title track pummeling you with a choral vocal from Marlatt glimmering spookily over distorted church organ and visceral bass mutilation. If "King Night" batters you into submission then the likes of "Asia" and "Frost" offer something lighter - still featuring the type of bottom end that could demolish skyscrapers, but they’re more atmospheric, less bombastic, formed around delicate drifts of eerily calm electronic. Donoghue adds rapping on a few tracks - slurred, slowed and treated with so many fx that he sounds like a Charles Laughton in his Hunchback of Notre Dame guise reborn as Raekwon.
another review from Coke Machine Glow:
https://web.archive.org/web/20120414204 ... night-2010
Salem - King Night (IAMSOUND; 2010)
Rating: 81%
Combined Rating: 76%
King Night is some throbbing, deep, spittle-choked death music; it sounds like an overdose at a rave, depraved, unholy; it also rules, in its evocation of this venality. Salem are the best of a burgeoning microgenre called, with characteristic microgenre misfortune, witch house or drag. I prefer “drag,” in that it lacks exact precedent and we can then view what Salem have crafted here not as a cute genre cross-pollination but as something whole of itself. Their fellow-travelers in this game rely on haunted house gimmickry and hip-hop affectation, having the feel of a more committed Danger Mouse or more focused Girl Talk; to these joke-y lads, I say, give the title “witch house.” Drag, on the other hand, implies the pull of a heavy narcotic, and its commingling here with party sonics implies the enthusiastically private goings-on of a shitville apartment complex. If you know what Coricidin is then I am talking directly to you, or more accurately to what is left of you.
The movement exists between a lot of neat tag-line intersections—say, “DJ Screw and Burzum”—but on King Night and its anticipatory mixtape I Buried My Heart Inna Wounded Knee it amounts to much more than that. For those with a taste for both Houston and, um, Hell, its appeal is all-consuming. I tar myself guilty, awaiting feathers. Wounded Knee emerged unexpectedly in August, a diffuse 43:23 of unnatural structure, frequently crumbling when it should be climaxing and phasing between tracks with an almost aggressive lack of sense. It endeared, mostly, in theory—as a practical explanation of what drag might sound like at its best—but it endeared all the same, particularly when Salem filtered recognizable sounds like Nico and Gucci Mane into the murk. When so emboldened, their production power is transformative, suggesting an intriguing future as vagabond remixers. As the authors of a coherent mixtape, however, I am not so certain. Wounded Knee is a one-listen triumph, perfect for streaming via the Internet and pretty much nothing else ever.
Lucky, then, that King Night ditches this miasmic structure for ten clear-cut tracks, each containing what could be called hooks, choruses, and so on, even if mostly instrumental and/or evil. Where Wounded Knee wheezes—there is a five minute stretch of what appears to be a dead little girl playing an acoustic guitar—King Night‘s got bounce. Miles of it, too: this might qualify as party music, to a type of person. “Trapdoor” is the most hip-hop thing here, and also a clear highlight, coming across a lot like the Block Beataz in its clipped swagger but with RZA-dirty synths. (Also: car crash sound effects, to huge payoff.) This triumph flips to “Redlights” and “Hound,” which both trick out big pop synth lines with 808 drum rolls and unintelligible lyrics, and flashes of Reznor-at-his-best production flourishes. Each track’s appeal is individualized to specific sonic elements: a blissed out rap here, a monstrous drop on the hook there. All of which is to say that, despite its imposing cover and sonic reference points, King Night is a remarkably accessible affair, a crossover bid from a genre that has not yet, and maybe shouldn’t be, an underground thing. Emo tweens, take notice.
Which, to anticipate a backlash that may or may not occur in the event of a crossover success or in the event that people start hating this microgenre merely because of its popularity/awful name (I see you, anti-chillwave sect), is not a bad thing. Like Fuck Buttons, Salem proves that experimental music needn’t be merely difficult, and that those experiments should be geared toward something. King Night is that thing, the sound of something wholly new (as explored on the mixtape) given a wonderfully snappy coherence. Like I mentioned above, on Wounded Knee they sample Gucci Mane and Nico, a handy set of reference points for people lazily playing spot-the-influence. On the proper album such obvious referents aren’t needed. 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.
:: myspace.com/s4lem