All Hail S4lem

Text: Digby Woods


Okay, let’s get this straight. S4lem is a trio of two guys (John Holland, the frontman and Jack Donoghue, the rap/beat master) and a girl (Heather Marlatt, singer extraordinaire). They are all from the US of A – or to be more precise, New York, Chicago and Detroit. They make music that is essentially dark electronic but with elements of shoegaze, psychedelic dubstep and trip-hop. I realise the pretentiousness of that statement, but that’s what you get when you are forced to describe something that is essentially genre-less.

All three members provide vocals for different tracks in different measure, but the one uniting factor is, (drum roll)… distortion. From Marlatt we have an ethereal ghostly wavering that makes you want to cry, Donoghue raps like a ghetto James Earl Jones if he’d been punched in the stomach, and Holland could easily pass as a Quaalude-munching Cookie Monster trying to describe his ‘visions’. Their lyrics are nowhere to be found on the Internet, a deliberate decision by Holland. “I want the lyrics to be there, ’cause I want the song to be about a certain thing,” he explains. “But I don’t want anyone to know what that thing is. It’s too personal.” Having achieved something of a cult-status thanks to the distributive abilities of MySpace, S4lem have released two EPs, Water and Yes I Smoke Crack, pressed on vinyl in limited runs of five hundred.

A full-length effort that is basically an amalgamation of the aforementioned EPs, plus a few new songs, was released in 2008, also on limited-run vinyl, called Fuckt.
Tracks like Skullcrush, Trapdoor and Sweat (I) set the precedent for S4lem’s well-deserved cult following, mixing Chicago ghetto-house sub-genres like juke and footwork to create a completely new monster.

Okay, did that make sense?

It doesn’t matter. I already told you, I can’t describe this.

All that matters is that S4lem makes some of the best ‘electro’-slash-whatever to come out of anywhere (particularly the States) in the last decade.

ALL HAIL S4LEM!