Monday, December 13, 2010

BEST OF 2010 (songs) #12 Salem - Redlights

Salem's 'Redlights' and 'Franklyn'(edit) from a-me s.myth on Vimeo.


In one of the year's most pathetic moments of music writing, the genre "witch-house" was coined. I've already ranted enough about how stupid the whole debacle was, although it did give us the not so well thought-out term "rape gaze," which made it worth while for all the wrong reasons. Salem was the band at the center of it all. When they weren't being asked by music journalists what they thought of the absurd descriptors being attached to them, they were making some mighty fine experimental dance pop. "Redlights" was an inspired piece of cathedral-sized ambient dance that mixed classic 4AD atmospherics with amped up electronics and a beat that stumbled as much as it gently pulsated, like liquored up dubstep. With "Redlights" Salem proved that it was the music that mattered and set them apart, not whatever half-assed critic-invented genre that unimaginative writers were clamoring to pigeonhole them as.

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