Salem: King Knight

Painfully truthful: The Sonic Youth of the echo-boomers?

It always starts in Michigan, doesn’t it, all that new-level-of-punk deconstruction? Okay, no, this sound didn’t actually start with these 3 honkies, not at all. The basics were yanked out of the Houston cracked-and-screwed Robitussin scene, from guys like Lil Villain, Most Hated and anyone else who raps low and slow, like what a straight kid thinks druggies hear when people talk.

There’s enough of a buzz about this album (they took forever and what, 50 EPs before this debut full-length) for me to at least feign hyperbole, so let’s: is this (or some crew just like this) the Sonic Youth of the echo-boomers? Effects and goth-rock white-noise jacked to 11, this is the sound of hiphop crumbling once and for all, falling in slo-mo, like the Towers, the end of everything. In this they’re simpatico with Sunn O))) in a way – aside from digging the Neil Peart complexity of the dubstepping el-cheapo drum machine, I don’t know why someone would crank this, why you’d do that to yourself, but it ain’t my generation that’s been wading through dust and rubble since life began, it’s yours.

Maybe it’s soothing in that respect, but whatever, it’s painful (as you like it) and painfully truthful.

By Eric Saeger

Homepage: Salem
Homepage: Iamsound Records