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The Stool Pigeon
@TheStoolPigeon
New issue out today: Salem, @nilerodgers @icecube N*E*R*D: @NeRdArMy Cee-Lo, No Age, John Maus, DJ Roc, Women, @chillygonzales
@freddiegibbs
12:49 pm · 14 Sep 2010
@TheStoolPigeon
New issue out today: Salem, @nilerodgers @icecube N*E*R*D: @NeRdArMy Cee-Lo, No Age, John Maus, DJ Roc, Women, @chillygonzales
@freddiegibbs
12:49 pm · 14 Sep 2010
https://web.archive.org/web/20110614174 ... rview.html
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Perfectly Charming
Trials, tribulations and breaking the spell of the extraordinary SALEM
Words by Kev Kharas Photography by Brendan Telzrow and Salem
I’ll be honest: I expected Salem to live in a slum; amid wallpaper peels that had leapt suicidally towards carpets that looked like death, in the sort of cramped, dirty rooms you might find your feet gone through by needles, your head lost in noxious, mid-afternoon crack fugs.
Salem make some of the most unsettling, physically affecting music I’ve ever heard; the poor, harried roar of static-stung synths pursued endlessly by lunatic juke percussion and demonic choirs bleeding kohl from their eyes. It’s a mix that’ll thieve your breath and stop your heart.
Earlier this year, John gave an interview to gay quarterly, Butt magazine. Spectacularly candid, it painted Salem — Heather Marlatt, Jack Donoghue and John Holland — as the sort of people who, at 16, started whoring themselves round the back of petrol stations and in pancake house parking lots to pay for speedball mashes of coke and heroin. The occult fascinations of their early aesthetic and the die-chokingin-a-car-while-a-stranger-writhes-naked-on-yourbonnet-style video they shot for ‘Dirt’ could only mean one thing — that Salem were drug-dependent devil-worshippers setting hexagrams ablaze in bonestrewn backyards, drinking dugong blood and screaming, “Kill whitey!” at children in the street.
This is not the case.
“We’ve had a lot of interviewers recently who have been like, ‘Oh, you guys seem really well adjusted,’” drawls Jack (pictured this page). “Just because I’m not necessarily in a fucked-up place right now doesn’t mean I wasn’t. We’re not gonna come to an interview and be like, ‘Fuck you!’ and start throwing chairs around. It’s not about showing how fucked up we are to everyone we come into contact with.
“Shit is real, you know what I’m saying? I feel like people have this expectation and they’re like, ‘They didn’t even shoot heroin in their toes.’”
Do you find strangers acting up to those sorts of expectations?
“Someone sent me a video once — really jerky footage from this remote place in Africa,” says Heather, drawing on her cigarette. “The people in the video thought these ladies were witches, so they were burning them alive. It was horrible. Why the fuck would someone send us something like that?”
“People ask me for drugs all the time,” adds Jack.
“What do they think I’m going to do?”
Stab syringes in their eyes? You can see where people get their ideas. Airport security pounced on me (or my Middle Eastern surname, at least) for extra security checks. When I told the border police at Detroit that I was coming to stay with a band called Salem — “you know, like the witch trials” — they kept asking me if Heather was “hot”, “easy” or “a witch”. Then they put ‘Salem Traverse City’ into Google and found reviews of their debut 7”, ‘Yes, We Smoke Crack’.
“Do they smoke crack?”
They searched my luggage with special machines. I missed my connecting flight.
“Shit, for real!? We’ve all had hard times in our lives and often, when I’m alone, I still get really upset,” admits Jack, amusement giving way to a solemn sort of anger in his voice. “But I feel like when we meet people, they’re waiting for it: ‘What are you guys gonna do? Are you gonna cry? Are you gonna stop the interview so you can shoot up?’ If you hung out with me in Chicago every day, I probably would. But that’s on my own time.”
Ever since I first spoke to Jack on the phone for this paper in winter 2008, I’d always imagined Salem in Chicago, the city where their male members first met. Only Jack remains in the city. “I started talking to John in the street,” Jack explained back then. “Straight away I told him he couldn’t be friends with any of his other friends any more. Just me.” As he went on to describe Chicago and the whole Midwest as “a bleak, sad place”, and himself as someone who chronically deprived his own body of sleep, I never thought I’d be anywhere approaching idyllic with Jack or with Salem. But Traverse City, on the banks of Lake Michigan 300 miles north of Chicago, where John and Heather live and Jack constantly visits, is bathed today in the sort of sour, hazy glow more familiar with impossibly perfect chillwave summers than the arcane, nocturnal ceremonies Salem’s music seems devoted to.
Downtown is a toy town: pristine family restaurants, micro-breweries, antique furniture stores and candle factories lining streets so clean you feel like a murderer just for dropping a fag end. A few minutes walk is all it takes for things to turn heritage suburban: white pickets and porches, Stars and Stripes flagging gently in the same breeze that jangles wind chimes, limply rebellious exceptions that reinforce the idea of this place as a monument to stillness. Traverse City: twinned with an undeveloped Gregory Crewdson negative, the scene for a novel John Updike never took past its first paragraph. There’s a pick-up truck or a 4x4 in every drive, but the only person in sight is a smiling, cycling soccer mom in cropped linen, who pipes a cheery, “Hi there!” as I shuffle drunkenly past her at dusk, wishing I had a camera because without photos I’m never gonna believe this place existed when I wake up tomorrow.
The gentle waves of Cedar Lake move across my beery vision in a beautiful, restless crosshatch flux. Heather lifts herself away from the earth and up onto the broad, wooden beam at the head of this small jetty. The water below us is clear and turquoise. The sky is, too. No one else is around, and the forest that wraps the lake is thick, the only noises coming from constantly buzzing cicadas. In our isolation and air so still, time begins to slow, mislaid in the water’s endlessly merging lines.
When Heather — a blonde betrayed by dark roots, pale sex parts clung to by spare, white bikini cloth — enters water, she does so vertically. Rigid arms straight coming up from her curves, fingers pointed, stretched to tip. A last, deep breath, then her feet leave the beam behind, sending her face first into the lake. She emerges, eyes flushed with blood, hair lank and damp, tugs at the material hiding her breasts, then sets out in a front crawl towards Jack, who lays further from land, long-hair splayed in the water and shouting wordlessly at the sun. John, yards from me, won’t get wet: he sits there with his head in his hands.
The way Salem swim reveals more than just their meat; it reveals what they are to each other, too. Heather, who has an office job that pays regularly, is easiest to read: her movements seem to be thought out, and in many respects resemble what you or I would regard as logic. On the evidence of the three days I spend in Traverse City, Jack’s life seems to consist of ceaselessly pursuing a gut feeling through moments, traces of each one disappearing upon impact with the next. This seems to make John — his brown eyes as wise, sad and deep as wells — nervous, though Jack reveals the “massive amount of respect” he felt as he watched his friend sleep last night with his newly-tattooed face (a dollar sign Jack put on his right cheek like a sad kiss).
The three of them seem to love each other very much and, in truth, Salem are some of the most real people I have ever met — the sort of people who make me and my earlier expectations feel stupid, and whose emotional complexity prevents them, really, from being any ‘sort of people’. During the time I’m in America, theirs are the only conversations that extend beyond pointless, say-nothing small talk. You overhear it everywhere — from holidaying businessmen biking by the lakes, and their clucking wives in the hotel lobby.
It’s their extreme sensitivity which makes new album King Night — out, weirdly, commendably, through Columbia in the UK — vulnerable to an ugly, desperate darkness, just as it makes it vulnerable to other things people don’t pick up on as readily because of its overwhelming emotional murk — beauty, joy, fear, love, comedy, lust, hope. Salem’s songs are chaotic and flushed, and seem to feel everything, all at once. Their transmissions are vivid but unrecognisable, as impressive and as hard to read as strange, new lights in the sky. You can see why they confuse people.
“We’re just trying to report back everything we’ve experienced,” explains Jack. “You know what I’m saying? If you can tell me there’s nothing in life that’s fucked up, then we’ll take everything fucked up out of our music.”
Burt Bacharach: listen to Salem. Gene Simmons: listen to Salem. Fearne Cotton: listen to Salem. The latter would be particularly interesting to observe, given that her sheer emotional pallor — unrivalled, in my experience, anywhere else in the world — renders her face the ultimate blank canvas. What would this music do to you, Fearne Cotton? I long to sit you in an empty room and use you as a mirror in which I can more easily observe the muddled, emotional contours of Salem’s minds. I imagine your face contorting itself into a thousand sycophantic, faux-empathetic gestures simultaneously; eyebrows frowning in fauxconcern; lips like exploded fruit, caught between a faux-smile and whatever emotion the word ‘eek’ pertains to; nose crumpled in disgust like a fucking crashed car. If she survived, someone would need to devise her a new expression solely for the purpose of responding to Salem. If she survived…
Sorry… Jack?
“It’s the easiest thing for people to simplify us to, ‘Oooh, they’re really fucked up and dark. Don’t turn the lights off…’”
He makes a kind of ‘welcome to the ghost train’ gesture with his hands. You must be able to see how and why people are unsettled by your music, though, haunted as it is by synth rushes that seem to rip and tear at their own burning skin, rhythmic patterns mangled into unnatural shapes by vortices of delay, the wail and moan of disembodied voices promising to “slit your wrists, little lamb”? Often, different parts of same songs seem repulsed by each other, generating a perverse, trapped tension — holy choral flights like unison bird flocks rise to cure codeine-slowed, ‘chopped and screwed’ rap leers.
People don’t always like perverse tension, Jack. It worries them.
“Do you feel it’s more realistic to be vague with vocals, the music, the message, but put a truer feeling across?” he asks, rhetorically. “Because to me, that’s how I experience things. Whereas songs that are super clear, loyally depicting a situation…”
He winces, shakes his head, his reference triggering an immediate flood of images — Jagger curling his mouth round ‘The Last Time’ on Shindig! in ’65, Squeeze performing ‘Up The Junction’ on Top Of The Pops in ’79, Phil Oakey’s uppity waitress girlfriend chucking him two years later.
“That’s not how I experience life,” continues Jack. “It’s just not.”
Does anyone? Listening to a track like ‘Hound’ gives me hope that this young century will at last be able to reclaim its apostrophe from the one that went before it. None of those pop-cultural memories I hold first-hand. Bands as original and powerful as Salem don’t come along very often, and maybe not from this country since Nirvana.
At times it’s tempting to view Salem’s music as an attack on language itself, such is their dismissal of linear narratives that pop will surely soon outgrow. Words and voices are summarily abused — Jack’s raps are slowed into something much deeper and more incomprehensible, even, than his jaw-rattling Chicagoan drawl can manage, while anything Heather and John have to say is either delivered wordlessly or else drenched in static meteor hail (despite previous claims to the contrary, no one other than these three has ever ‘sung’ for Salem).
Many have seen this as an attempt to conjure some cheap mystery, but it’s not: listening to Salem talk and tic through conversation today, it feels like their aim is to be super-expressive; to go beyond words. You’ll feel a lot of their music before you hear it: low-end tremors vibrating muscles and tissue beneath your skin to better mirror what Salem tear from themselves for the sake of their music. It doesn’t matter that their lyrics are buried because their noises are more articulate. They know that trying to trap the vagaries of glowing guts or aching ribs in a word murders emotional possibilities, and they defy genre tags just as easily as they do emotional ones. They aren’t shoegaze, goth, hip hop, house, classical or juke, just as they aren’t happy, sad, in love or afraid (though they are often some combination of all these things and more). They aren’t ‘witch house’, either — the scene that’s sprung up in tribute to Heather, Jack and John and whose acts’ cryptic tendencies (try telling your friends about ‘oOoOO’, or putting /// /\/\/\ \\\ into Google) misunderstand Salem’s reach for truer expression.
“We don’t really take stuff like that too seriously,” John says of the term.
Jack pitches in: “Some of these people, when I see them trying to put together their own aesthetic it’s like, ‘Yeah, you took notes, so credit for that.’”
Beware all ye indebted to the smoke, mirrors and sad-smile occult perversions of Salem’s early aesthetic. They crush you.
There is a regular witch house night at this club half an hour walk from my house in London, I tell them.
“We’ve never even been to Europe,” says Heather, laughing.
Rather than looking to hide inside their music, they approach it in the same way Heather confronts open bodies of water — things are dived into head on, face first.
“I don’t wanna say that our music is, like, some therapeutic thing,” she muses, “because it’s not like that. But sometimes when I can’t organise things in my mind, I can make a song, listen back to it and understand what I was feeling.”
“If I understood the things that upset me, then I wouldn’t be upset by them,” Jack says, laughing, stumbling into truth.
We’re now on East Pico Drive, back at the home Heather and John share with a yappy black and white Pekingese named Timmy. The house, with its own American flag, is typical of homes in this quiet neighbourhood, but the bedrooms are busy with sentiment-loaded paintings, skulls, tokens and tribal gewgaws you wouldn’t expect to find nextdoor. A home studio with its microphone wrapped in wilted roses waits in the dark of the basement with a couple of bare mattresses. In no way is number 10535 untidy or littered with drug paraphernalia. We walk out into the back garden, where John has laid a wood-chip path to a clearing in some trees behind the house. Chipmunks scurry, a distant neighbour mows, seven-inch animal bones hang from string roped trunk-to-trunk and several chairs sit in a circle around a dead fire. I wonder who’s been sat here, given that John’s already told me he doesn’t tend to see anyone who lives in Traverse City other than Heather and a few men he sleeps with.
As the light fades, Salem start to become more recognisable.
“It’s peaceful and quiet, and the air is really nice,” says John of his current hometown. “It’s easier for us to make music here, but there are really good things about other places we’ve lived and recorded — Chicago, New York…”
“Because he was born in the city, I feel like it’s too quiet for Jack out here,” says Heather, and she may have a point. Jack says he spent the majority of this summer drunk on the roof of an abandoned hospital in Chicago. Shortly after my visit he sent me a photograph of himself at a party with half his face hanging off. “Military freak hold a 6-inch knife!” reads its caption. “But don’t worry, baby, Jack still here!”
“I feel like I outdo everyone I know in the city in terms of wanting to be moving all the time,” he says, peering at the ground in front of him. The cicadas, buzzing, seem to get louder whenever his mouth opens. “When I was younger I went to a psychiatrist. My mum was worried. She’d always say the only time she saw me still was when I was making beats.
“It’s sort of fucked up, but I feel physically sick if I stay in the same place or with the same person too long. I just feel trapped, and really late at night, at home or even here, I’ll just go out walking. When I was younger I’d always walk to the Sears Tower, no matter where I was, then figure out what to do once I got there. I haven’t been doing that as much recently. I lost someone really near to me and at that point I felt so disinterested in everything that I didn’t want to be awake. This is so… I’ve never verbalised this before, but I’ve thought about it a lot. For the first time in my life, I wanted to sleep. I don’t dream, so before it just seemed like a waste, but last year something changed…” His eyes redden. “It was my father. He had a heart attack and he drowned. I don’t know, I don’t think we’ve ever really talked about this… does that make sense to you, John?”
“We haven’t, but that makes sense,” John says tenderly, smiling gently at his friend.
While Jack proves his restlessness by wandering off into the forest for an hour, I decide not to press John too hard on his time spent fucking men in car parks. I was told beforehand how the mere mention of that Butt interview can bring tears from John. No need to bleary four of Salem’s eyes. Out of booze, we pile into Heather’s rusty Subaru for a late night drive.
As the headlights stretch out to illuminate small pockets of the night, I think back to something Jack said earlier about how hard it was to recreate feelings found in basements and bedrooms in front of others on a stage. “Ideally we’d always be playing in someone’s car at night,” he said, “It’d be more of a personal thing. You’d have to interpret how it affected you.” As we hurtle along, I’m thinking about how the people around me make more sense back here, in the forced, dark intimacy of this rattling wagon than they ever could in lights as bright as those ahead when John rolls down the window to let Salem’s music blare, an ambiguous slime creeping out to disturb the sleeping neatness of Traverse City.
Trials, tribulations and breaking the spell of the extraordinary SALEM
Words by Kev Kharas Photography by Brendan Telzrow and Salem
I’ll be honest: I expected Salem to live in a slum; amid wallpaper peels that had leapt suicidally towards carpets that looked like death, in the sort of cramped, dirty rooms you might find your feet gone through by needles, your head lost in noxious, mid-afternoon crack fugs.
Salem make some of the most unsettling, physically affecting music I’ve ever heard; the poor, harried roar of static-stung synths pursued endlessly by lunatic juke percussion and demonic choirs bleeding kohl from their eyes. It’s a mix that’ll thieve your breath and stop your heart.
Earlier this year, John gave an interview to gay quarterly, Butt magazine. Spectacularly candid, it painted Salem — Heather Marlatt, Jack Donoghue and John Holland — as the sort of people who, at 16, started whoring themselves round the back of petrol stations and in pancake house parking lots to pay for speedball mashes of coke and heroin. The occult fascinations of their early aesthetic and the die-chokingin-a-car-while-a-stranger-writhes-naked-on-yourbonnet-style video they shot for ‘Dirt’ could only mean one thing — that Salem were drug-dependent devil-worshippers setting hexagrams ablaze in bonestrewn backyards, drinking dugong blood and screaming, “Kill whitey!” at children in the street.
This is not the case.
“We’ve had a lot of interviewers recently who have been like, ‘Oh, you guys seem really well adjusted,’” drawls Jack (pictured this page). “Just because I’m not necessarily in a fucked-up place right now doesn’t mean I wasn’t. We’re not gonna come to an interview and be like, ‘Fuck you!’ and start throwing chairs around. It’s not about showing how fucked up we are to everyone we come into contact with.
“Shit is real, you know what I’m saying? I feel like people have this expectation and they’re like, ‘They didn’t even shoot heroin in their toes.’”
Do you find strangers acting up to those sorts of expectations?
“Someone sent me a video once — really jerky footage from this remote place in Africa,” says Heather, drawing on her cigarette. “The people in the video thought these ladies were witches, so they were burning them alive. It was horrible. Why the fuck would someone send us something like that?”
“People ask me for drugs all the time,” adds Jack.
“What do they think I’m going to do?”
Stab syringes in their eyes? You can see where people get their ideas. Airport security pounced on me (or my Middle Eastern surname, at least) for extra security checks. When I told the border police at Detroit that I was coming to stay with a band called Salem — “you know, like the witch trials” — they kept asking me if Heather was “hot”, “easy” or “a witch”. Then they put ‘Salem Traverse City’ into Google and found reviews of their debut 7”, ‘Yes, We Smoke Crack’.
“Do they smoke crack?”
They searched my luggage with special machines. I missed my connecting flight.
“Shit, for real!? We’ve all had hard times in our lives and often, when I’m alone, I still get really upset,” admits Jack, amusement giving way to a solemn sort of anger in his voice. “But I feel like when we meet people, they’re waiting for it: ‘What are you guys gonna do? Are you gonna cry? Are you gonna stop the interview so you can shoot up?’ If you hung out with me in Chicago every day, I probably would. But that’s on my own time.”
Ever since I first spoke to Jack on the phone for this paper in winter 2008, I’d always imagined Salem in Chicago, the city where their male members first met. Only Jack remains in the city. “I started talking to John in the street,” Jack explained back then. “Straight away I told him he couldn’t be friends with any of his other friends any more. Just me.” As he went on to describe Chicago and the whole Midwest as “a bleak, sad place”, and himself as someone who chronically deprived his own body of sleep, I never thought I’d be anywhere approaching idyllic with Jack or with Salem. But Traverse City, on the banks of Lake Michigan 300 miles north of Chicago, where John and Heather live and Jack constantly visits, is bathed today in the sort of sour, hazy glow more familiar with impossibly perfect chillwave summers than the arcane, nocturnal ceremonies Salem’s music seems devoted to.
Downtown is a toy town: pristine family restaurants, micro-breweries, antique furniture stores and candle factories lining streets so clean you feel like a murderer just for dropping a fag end. A few minutes walk is all it takes for things to turn heritage suburban: white pickets and porches, Stars and Stripes flagging gently in the same breeze that jangles wind chimes, limply rebellious exceptions that reinforce the idea of this place as a monument to stillness. Traverse City: twinned with an undeveloped Gregory Crewdson negative, the scene for a novel John Updike never took past its first paragraph. There’s a pick-up truck or a 4x4 in every drive, but the only person in sight is a smiling, cycling soccer mom in cropped linen, who pipes a cheery, “Hi there!” as I shuffle drunkenly past her at dusk, wishing I had a camera because without photos I’m never gonna believe this place existed when I wake up tomorrow.
The gentle waves of Cedar Lake move across my beery vision in a beautiful, restless crosshatch flux. Heather lifts herself away from the earth and up onto the broad, wooden beam at the head of this small jetty. The water below us is clear and turquoise. The sky is, too. No one else is around, and the forest that wraps the lake is thick, the only noises coming from constantly buzzing cicadas. In our isolation and air so still, time begins to slow, mislaid in the water’s endlessly merging lines.
When Heather — a blonde betrayed by dark roots, pale sex parts clung to by spare, white bikini cloth — enters water, she does so vertically. Rigid arms straight coming up from her curves, fingers pointed, stretched to tip. A last, deep breath, then her feet leave the beam behind, sending her face first into the lake. She emerges, eyes flushed with blood, hair lank and damp, tugs at the material hiding her breasts, then sets out in a front crawl towards Jack, who lays further from land, long-hair splayed in the water and shouting wordlessly at the sun. John, yards from me, won’t get wet: he sits there with his head in his hands.
The way Salem swim reveals more than just their meat; it reveals what they are to each other, too. Heather, who has an office job that pays regularly, is easiest to read: her movements seem to be thought out, and in many respects resemble what you or I would regard as logic. On the evidence of the three days I spend in Traverse City, Jack’s life seems to consist of ceaselessly pursuing a gut feeling through moments, traces of each one disappearing upon impact with the next. This seems to make John — his brown eyes as wise, sad and deep as wells — nervous, though Jack reveals the “massive amount of respect” he felt as he watched his friend sleep last night with his newly-tattooed face (a dollar sign Jack put on his right cheek like a sad kiss).
The three of them seem to love each other very much and, in truth, Salem are some of the most real people I have ever met — the sort of people who make me and my earlier expectations feel stupid, and whose emotional complexity prevents them, really, from being any ‘sort of people’. During the time I’m in America, theirs are the only conversations that extend beyond pointless, say-nothing small talk. You overhear it everywhere — from holidaying businessmen biking by the lakes, and their clucking wives in the hotel lobby.
It’s their extreme sensitivity which makes new album King Night — out, weirdly, commendably, through Columbia in the UK — vulnerable to an ugly, desperate darkness, just as it makes it vulnerable to other things people don’t pick up on as readily because of its overwhelming emotional murk — beauty, joy, fear, love, comedy, lust, hope. Salem’s songs are chaotic and flushed, and seem to feel everything, all at once. Their transmissions are vivid but unrecognisable, as impressive and as hard to read as strange, new lights in the sky. You can see why they confuse people.
“We’re just trying to report back everything we’ve experienced,” explains Jack. “You know what I’m saying? If you can tell me there’s nothing in life that’s fucked up, then we’ll take everything fucked up out of our music.”
Burt Bacharach: listen to Salem. Gene Simmons: listen to Salem. Fearne Cotton: listen to Salem. The latter would be particularly interesting to observe, given that her sheer emotional pallor — unrivalled, in my experience, anywhere else in the world — renders her face the ultimate blank canvas. What would this music do to you, Fearne Cotton? I long to sit you in an empty room and use you as a mirror in which I can more easily observe the muddled, emotional contours of Salem’s minds. I imagine your face contorting itself into a thousand sycophantic, faux-empathetic gestures simultaneously; eyebrows frowning in fauxconcern; lips like exploded fruit, caught between a faux-smile and whatever emotion the word ‘eek’ pertains to; nose crumpled in disgust like a fucking crashed car. If she survived, someone would need to devise her a new expression solely for the purpose of responding to Salem. If she survived…
Sorry… Jack?
“It’s the easiest thing for people to simplify us to, ‘Oooh, they’re really fucked up and dark. Don’t turn the lights off…’”
He makes a kind of ‘welcome to the ghost train’ gesture with his hands. You must be able to see how and why people are unsettled by your music, though, haunted as it is by synth rushes that seem to rip and tear at their own burning skin, rhythmic patterns mangled into unnatural shapes by vortices of delay, the wail and moan of disembodied voices promising to “slit your wrists, little lamb”? Often, different parts of same songs seem repulsed by each other, generating a perverse, trapped tension — holy choral flights like unison bird flocks rise to cure codeine-slowed, ‘chopped and screwed’ rap leers.
People don’t always like perverse tension, Jack. It worries them.
“Do you feel it’s more realistic to be vague with vocals, the music, the message, but put a truer feeling across?” he asks, rhetorically. “Because to me, that’s how I experience things. Whereas songs that are super clear, loyally depicting a situation…”
He winces, shakes his head, his reference triggering an immediate flood of images — Jagger curling his mouth round ‘The Last Time’ on Shindig! in ’65, Squeeze performing ‘Up The Junction’ on Top Of The Pops in ’79, Phil Oakey’s uppity waitress girlfriend chucking him two years later.
“That’s not how I experience life,” continues Jack. “It’s just not.”
Does anyone? Listening to a track like ‘Hound’ gives me hope that this young century will at last be able to reclaim its apostrophe from the one that went before it. None of those pop-cultural memories I hold first-hand. Bands as original and powerful as Salem don’t come along very often, and maybe not from this country since Nirvana.
At times it’s tempting to view Salem’s music as an attack on language itself, such is their dismissal of linear narratives that pop will surely soon outgrow. Words and voices are summarily abused — Jack’s raps are slowed into something much deeper and more incomprehensible, even, than his jaw-rattling Chicagoan drawl can manage, while anything Heather and John have to say is either delivered wordlessly or else drenched in static meteor hail (despite previous claims to the contrary, no one other than these three has ever ‘sung’ for Salem).
Many have seen this as an attempt to conjure some cheap mystery, but it’s not: listening to Salem talk and tic through conversation today, it feels like their aim is to be super-expressive; to go beyond words. You’ll feel a lot of their music before you hear it: low-end tremors vibrating muscles and tissue beneath your skin to better mirror what Salem tear from themselves for the sake of their music. It doesn’t matter that their lyrics are buried because their noises are more articulate. They know that trying to trap the vagaries of glowing guts or aching ribs in a word murders emotional possibilities, and they defy genre tags just as easily as they do emotional ones. They aren’t shoegaze, goth, hip hop, house, classical or juke, just as they aren’t happy, sad, in love or afraid (though they are often some combination of all these things and more). They aren’t ‘witch house’, either — the scene that’s sprung up in tribute to Heather, Jack and John and whose acts’ cryptic tendencies (try telling your friends about ‘oOoOO’, or putting /// /\/\/\ \\\ into Google) misunderstand Salem’s reach for truer expression.
“We don’t really take stuff like that too seriously,” John says of the term.
Jack pitches in: “Some of these people, when I see them trying to put together their own aesthetic it’s like, ‘Yeah, you took notes, so credit for that.’”
Beware all ye indebted to the smoke, mirrors and sad-smile occult perversions of Salem’s early aesthetic. They crush you.
There is a regular witch house night at this club half an hour walk from my house in London, I tell them.
“We’ve never even been to Europe,” says Heather, laughing.
Rather than looking to hide inside their music, they approach it in the same way Heather confronts open bodies of water — things are dived into head on, face first.
“I don’t wanna say that our music is, like, some therapeutic thing,” she muses, “because it’s not like that. But sometimes when I can’t organise things in my mind, I can make a song, listen back to it and understand what I was feeling.”
“If I understood the things that upset me, then I wouldn’t be upset by them,” Jack says, laughing, stumbling into truth.
We’re now on East Pico Drive, back at the home Heather and John share with a yappy black and white Pekingese named Timmy. The house, with its own American flag, is typical of homes in this quiet neighbourhood, but the bedrooms are busy with sentiment-loaded paintings, skulls, tokens and tribal gewgaws you wouldn’t expect to find nextdoor. A home studio with its microphone wrapped in wilted roses waits in the dark of the basement with a couple of bare mattresses. In no way is number 10535 untidy or littered with drug paraphernalia. We walk out into the back garden, where John has laid a wood-chip path to a clearing in some trees behind the house. Chipmunks scurry, a distant neighbour mows, seven-inch animal bones hang from string roped trunk-to-trunk and several chairs sit in a circle around a dead fire. I wonder who’s been sat here, given that John’s already told me he doesn’t tend to see anyone who lives in Traverse City other than Heather and a few men he sleeps with.
As the light fades, Salem start to become more recognisable.
“It’s peaceful and quiet, and the air is really nice,” says John of his current hometown. “It’s easier for us to make music here, but there are really good things about other places we’ve lived and recorded — Chicago, New York…”
“Because he was born in the city, I feel like it’s too quiet for Jack out here,” says Heather, and she may have a point. Jack says he spent the majority of this summer drunk on the roof of an abandoned hospital in Chicago. Shortly after my visit he sent me a photograph of himself at a party with half his face hanging off. “Military freak hold a 6-inch knife!” reads its caption. “But don’t worry, baby, Jack still here!”
“I feel like I outdo everyone I know in the city in terms of wanting to be moving all the time,” he says, peering at the ground in front of him. The cicadas, buzzing, seem to get louder whenever his mouth opens. “When I was younger I went to a psychiatrist. My mum was worried. She’d always say the only time she saw me still was when I was making beats.
“It’s sort of fucked up, but I feel physically sick if I stay in the same place or with the same person too long. I just feel trapped, and really late at night, at home or even here, I’ll just go out walking. When I was younger I’d always walk to the Sears Tower, no matter where I was, then figure out what to do once I got there. I haven’t been doing that as much recently. I lost someone really near to me and at that point I felt so disinterested in everything that I didn’t want to be awake. This is so… I’ve never verbalised this before, but I’ve thought about it a lot. For the first time in my life, I wanted to sleep. I don’t dream, so before it just seemed like a waste, but last year something changed…” His eyes redden. “It was my father. He had a heart attack and he drowned. I don’t know, I don’t think we’ve ever really talked about this… does that make sense to you, John?”
“We haven’t, but that makes sense,” John says tenderly, smiling gently at his friend.
While Jack proves his restlessness by wandering off into the forest for an hour, I decide not to press John too hard on his time spent fucking men in car parks. I was told beforehand how the mere mention of that Butt interview can bring tears from John. No need to bleary four of Salem’s eyes. Out of booze, we pile into Heather’s rusty Subaru for a late night drive.
As the headlights stretch out to illuminate small pockets of the night, I think back to something Jack said earlier about how hard it was to recreate feelings found in basements and bedrooms in front of others on a stage. “Ideally we’d always be playing in someone’s car at night,” he said, “It’d be more of a personal thing. You’d have to interpret how it affected you.” As we hurtle along, I’m thinking about how the people around me make more sense back here, in the forced, dark intimacy of this rattling wagon than they ever could in lights as bright as those ahead when John rolls down the window to let Salem’s music blare, an ambiguous slime creeping out to disturb the sleeping neatness of Traverse City.