In Rotation: Ariel Pink’s Haunted Graffiti, Balam Acab (Review)
In Rotation is a regular Opus feature where I post short reviews of noteworthy music, both new and old, that I’ve been listening to lately.
Before Today by Ariel Pink’s Haunted Graffiti (Review)
Much of the album is a muddled, incoherent, and underwhelming mess.
“See Birds” by Balam Acab
A few weeks ago, Pitchfork ran a feature titled “Ghosts in the Machine” which looked at the “witch house” genre (which, by the way, ranks right up there with “chillwave” and “glo-fi” as silly genre names go). As a genre, “witch house” artists take dubstep and hip-hop influences, slow the beats down to a molasses-like crawl, layer on plenty of moody, psychedelic atmospherics, and send ghostly, manipulated vocals drifting through the mix. The result is music that is as eerie as it is atmospheric, but with a strangely human quality that is hard to ignore.
There are numerous artists working within the “witch house” genre — Salem, White Ring, oOoOO, Fostercare, xix — but Balam Acab is the one that really gets to me. If Burial sounds like, as one poster on Arts & Faith put it, the sound you hear “when most of the club has emptied out and the strobes and colored lighting are replaced with cold florescence”, then Balam Acab sounds like the ghosts that haunt said club attempting to communicate with the living via drum machines and laptops.
Whereas other “witch house” artists often seem to be trying too hard to be creepy/ominous/whatever, Balam Acab’s music contains a grace and poignancy amidst the darkness that makes it more affecting than evil. “See Birds” (listen to it here) sounds like it was recorded about a mile beneath the surface of the ocean, and it moves with the sort of slow-motion grace that accompanies underwater movement. At the same time, there’s a fragility in the tweaked vocals and exotic dulcimer-esque tones implying that the water pressure is threatening to slowly crush the proceedings to nothing — which only adds to the track’s haunting immediacy.