Camp of Wolves : Bear Creek

David Salisbury, aka Camp of Wolves, works in memories both bittersweet and melancholy. Tender, subtle tomes that reflect on time and childhood and those complicated building blocks of experience that go to shape the adult we become, once we’ve sadly left those formative years. Humming, ghostly tomes that come at you like ghosts of the past; thoughtful interrogations that arrive in the middle of the night while sleep avoids us.

I’ve been fascinated with Camp of Wolves ever since I heard Granite Creek in 2021. Haunted songs that resonate with your own memories and experiences, just as much as they resonated with Salisbury himself. It’s the all-encompassing melodies that get you; forlorn, ghostly, and gentle yet something strikingly aged and vintage about it as well. It was as if opening a box and finding artifacts from some other time, that belong in someone else’s memories. These are feelings, themes, and overall vibes Camp of Wolves would continue to explore on future albums like Green Timbers(Waxing Crescent Records) and A Whisper of Broken Things(Woodford Halse).

The latest from Salisbury’s Camp of Wolves project is no less engaging. Bear Creek is a trip back home, to a town we all know and have been haunted by our whole lives. A place we grew up in and escaped as soon as we could. Yet, despite our age and list of accomplishments that space lives rent free in our hearts and minds. It haunts us, bringing us back into its fold when deep in sleep. It’s our childhood homes and towns, that despite our age and experience we never quite escape.

Here is how Salisbury described Bear Creek: “With Bear Creek I wanted to give the album a warm, handmade feel as though it were cut from construction paper, coloured with crayons and held together with paste like some sort of weird childhood diorama imbued with a lingering sense of the “other”. I tried to walk a fine line between complex, often conflicting emotions while exploring this theme, drawing from an organic, woodsy-summer-camp-inspired sound palette that still remained, at its core, electronic music. At it’s essence it is really a sort of Lynchian love letter to my childhood home and that is what I hope to convey.”

“A weird childhood diorama” is the perfect descriptor for this record. A diorama that lights up in the middle of the night as it sits on your desk while you sleep. A portal to a world you knew so well, yet now seems like a distant dream haunted and longing for you to return. “Labrador Tea” brings you gently into the world of Bear Creek. A slow drive through trees that form a tunnel of leaves and limbs over dilapidated country roads. The ominous tones of “Flickering Light” have a weariness to them, as if the memories about to rise from your subconscious won’t all be great ones. And the beautiful, mournful “Tumulus” carries with it a heaviness that’s hard to shake.

Bear Creek is a wonderful, ghostly experience throughout. An electronic album of organic beauty that seems to mix Badalamenti’s dramatic delivery with the warm nostalgia of comfy synth artists like Covered Bridges. From the dreamy “Amongst Firs” to the bittersweet “Summer’s End” to the hazy, almost trip-hop feel of “Cross The Townline”, Salisbury and Camp of Wolves paint a visceral vision of a rural childhood that never leaves, for better or worse. “Built On Bogs” is the perfect finish here; a gauzy, fog-like closer that leaves us in a haze of ambiguity that could be closure or just a feeling of being resigned to these memories haunting us forever.

Camp of Wolves’ continues to make heavy, heady, and transformative music that pulls you in on the first note and keeps you engaged till the last note fades. Bear Creek is a bittersweet and haunting work. A musical world worth the road trip.