- It wouldn't be fair to mention Ithaca, New York's young Balam Acab without first saying something about goth crunk merchants Salem. Both rely on the same lugubrious slow-mo formula of pitched-down vocals, pitched-up vocals, heavy bass drums and spooky echoes of Three 6 Mafia, Burial, Boards Of Canada and Dead Can Dance. See Birds is Balam Acab's first release, and it's a little less glum than Salem's King Night, but all the more ghostly.
Its opener, "See Birds (Moon)," is a dream, skittering over an underproduced bassline and a bizarre vocal phrase that could've been culled from an old Goblin soundtrack. Haunted Tokyo synth-clatter rises and fades somewhere in the middle. We're met with dizzied glossolalia and chopped-up samples of a riverside. (Think Green River Killer in this case, not a babbling brook.)
There is a question that comes with See Birds, much like King Night. Is this stuff simply part of electronic music's long catalog of ephemera, soon to go back through the hazy club fog and into post-boom obscurity, much like the explosion of electroclash a few years back? Witch house has relied more on its aesthetic than its instrumentation or method of production—at least until this point. Trip-hop came about similarly, born with a surreal night mood, taking cues from early '90s hip-hop, and we all know where that ended up.
"Dream Out" plays slowly toward the end of See Birds. Its title is quite accurate: There are chipmunk verses, what sounds like a woman panting; the kick, the snare. Water samples move along the woozy chords, here again to imply a theme. This ends and the final track starts. Spray-can hisses of soft noise begin and a male voice groans, singing something deathly. Toward the end there is an arpeggio. We hear a bright chord, a quicker tempo. Perhaps we see birds.
Tracklist 01. See Birds (Moon)
02. Regret Making Mistakes
03. Big Boy
04. Dream Out
05. See Birds (Sun)