Buzz bands and buzz-genres can run in small, exclusive circles, so if you haven’t heard of Salem, or “witch-house”  by now, (or the mountainous molehill of a controversy behind “rape-gaze”), I respect you. This means you have not committed your time and energy to figuring out why bands have buzz, whether or not that buzz demands respect, and whether or not to commit to championing this band to your friends/readers. The actual music often plays second fiddle to “buzz” [read: an abstract collective excitement caused by over-exposure], and staying out of your head and keeping focused on the music is challenging, especially so with Salem. Are they pioneers? Are they idiot savants? Are they novelty?

For Salem’s debut LP King Night, the result is really an unbalanced combination of the three. A few moments on the album sound thrilling and open many heretofore unopened doors. Many moments feel base and amateur, causing the DIY dragged-out/drugged-out aesthetic to wax and wane with varying degrees of enjoyment. And some moments are downright laughable and grating, like some pathological joke. This mixture creates an album that is very hard to get through front to back, not only because of its unevenness, but because it’s morose, disturbing, and unfriendly. So if you see a cliched, haunted forest in Salem, you should know that there are some pretty cool-looking trees to look at, too.

But to find those special moments, there’s a lot of trawling to do. Salem doesn’t so much lean on its slow ‘n’ cheap MIDI beats with layered synth as it relies solely and exclusively on it.  This is where the novelty overwhelms the album, and opening, faux-epic track “King Night” pretty much tells you where the rest of the album is going. There’s some grime; there’s some dub; there’s some dirty south hip hop; there’s some occult, all which will appeal to fans of said genres and attract some new ones. But it’s high-time we stop awarding all bands with new classifications and just be honest for a second: this is cheap pastiche.

It’s fun to parse out the different styles, and no doubt, the beats lend themselves to some some good head-nods. The synth lines are offensive, but this works well, because never has the use of synth sounded so metal. I applaud Salem for somehow making the same module that Van Halen used in “Jump” sound so disturbing. The third, and arguably final component to Salem’s sound is in the lyrics, which are all but indiscernible and buried in the production, one exception being when one of the trio’s members decides to drop some horror raps like the juvenility and FML nihilism found in “Trapdoor.” It makes KoRn sound like Thoreau. The flow and lryics are laughable and impossible to take seriously, especially with the gloom and doom of the music surrounding it.

Without anything interesting to say, halfway through King Night, Salem is beating the living hell out of a dead, dead horse. The band doesn’t seem smart enough to know when to put a lid on it, and any chance of subtlety is thrown right out the window.  Not that this music requires subtlety–it doesn’t. But to make an imprint on the musical map, to live up to the “buzz”, as I think Sleigh Bells did with their debut, there needs to be a sense of direction, an idea of where they could go from here, and the band needs to fill a much needed void.  Salem fills no void save the one they seem to create for themselves. There is no journey to be found in the album, and the music is ultimately a monotonous collection of crack-pipe nightmares, a gimmick fit for play around Halloween time, kind of like Bobby Pickett’s ”The Monster Mash.”

The exception to all of this is “Redlights”, which marries Salem’s sound with shoe-gaze and The xx’s breezy female-centric trip-hop. The sparse melodicism is a welcome respite from many songs on the album, supporting one of the few songs that sounds relevant and rooted in something sincere. It is also one of the few songs you’ll actually want to sit around and listen to.  In the same vein, “Traxx” also shows promise as a direction for the band to explore, but it seems uprooted and not as organic as the former track.

Salem may have more creativity in them, and perhaps they’ll buckle down and focus on a direction. But until their music becomes somehow subversive or relevant, rebellious or conformist, they’re destined to be just another name on another list of attempted breakouts, fit for inclusion on a couple of 2010 mix tapes, a tossed off debate over drinks. Maybe, if you really want to fright the kids this Halloween, play this album through your speakers as unwitting children come trick-or-treating — it’ll scare the living shit out of them.