Salem - Playing God And Other Short Stories (2010)

Hailing from Israel, Salem is a very ‘diverse’ band that plays a combination of Death/Gothic/Doom Metal and it’s pretty good at it….. until now. “Playing God And Other Short Stories” is a very, very weird album that will either get on your nerves after the first three songs or you will totally love it. We are kind of in the middle since we think some songs are good and others are dreadful.

The first thing you will notice is the mixing on the drums is way high and makes them sound weird, plus the band does use some weird drumming structures on their songs (so we think) making it sound like a drum circle on crack. In other words, we think the percussions are extremely overdone in this release.

The second thing is that the guitar riffs are very diverse through the album, something not necessarily bad, unless they make the music sound completely disconnected and random at some points (take for example the song “Exodus”). Call us traditionalists, but we like a bit more of structure in our music, Salem’s music is pretty interesting but some songs feel very uninspired and random.

Another hit or miss is the vocals, they vary from harsh male vocals to angelic female vocals, sometimes this works very well, like on the song “The Downfall Of Paris Part II”, but other times they sound pretty random and plain bad like on “The Mark Of The Beast Part II”.

In general we feel that most songs in this album are pretty oddly written and only hardcore fans of the band will like them. We like some of the band’s older efforts like “A Moment of Silence” and “Kaddish”, but “Playing God And Other Short Stories” is just not exactly our cup of tea. We do like some parts, but then we get to hear the over the top drums and we are back into not liking this album.

Release: April 27th, 2010

Country: Israel