SALEM make the most physically affecting new music I've heard in years. The trio, based in the Midwest of the United States, are often compared to the likes of My Bloody Valentine or Cocteau Twins but - while they admit the pair as influences, alongside Juke, Trap Music and other regional US dance/hip-hop variants - all SALEM really share with the shoegazers is an ability to warp time; their slurred, dream-like jams descending like a chill in a room or a weight upon your shoulders. Thankfully, as "Whenusleep" testifies, SALEM's music is also intensely beautiful, Heather Marlot's coquettish vocal seeming to lead Jack Donoghue's beats tumbling from sanity's pedestal. Third member John Holland oversees to ensure the whole thing's as sparse, guilty and rotten as the knot in the gut of a treacherous lover.
Sounds Like: The Knife, My Bloody Valentine, Quest
SALEM - Whenusleep
SALEM's RCRD LBL Page
Remember when Scarlett Johansson put out a record? No tragedy by any means, if memory serves me right, but it did all seem a bit dismally comfortable in the end, what with David Bowie’s dad-like presence and Dave Sitek’s tendency to wrap the actress’s throat in so much layered sound she may as well’ve been singing through a scarf. Now, imagine if Anywhere I Lay My Head had been produced by U.S. Girls’ Megan Remy and featured a singer raised on arias and no-wave. Struggling? Try jamming “Last Day” – running barely beyond a minute, it’s a shotgun funeral of a song. “Sea Talk”, meanwhile, marries depth charging bass with delicately keyed ephemera in the same way that Telepathe do on next year’s Dance Mother LP – but instead of Busy Gangnes and Melissa Livaudais coolly recounting forest-bound death f*cks, there is singer Nika, with swollen heart melodrama. Evoking all manner of things – cigarettes in the rain and the lost glamour of old Europe; Toto and Suicide – Zola Jesus conjure cinema from the longing of lo-fi sounds for more expensive fidelity, Nika breathing sweet everythings through the mist into your cold, undeserving ears.
Sounds Like: Nite Jewel, the 1980s, The Hospitals
Zola Jesus - Last Day
Zola Jesus - Sea Talk
Zola Jesus' RCRD LBL Page
