Pajo : Dirges in the Dark

 

Scream With Me sounds like something recorded late at night, in a dark room, with an acoustic guitar, a cassette recorder, and nothing else. That setting isn’t a metaphor. It’s exactly what happened.

Now imagine that in that same room, sharing the darkness, are songs by the Misfits. The ones written by Glenn Danzig. Reinvented by David Pajo.

Pajo is not just any musician. He’s one of those names that show up in the credits of records that changed history. A core member of Slint and Tortoise. A close collaborator with Stereolab, Zwan, Interpol, Mogwai, and Gang of Four. A veteran of experimental music who knows exactly what he’s doing when he plays a note, and when he chooses not to.

But what truly enabled him to reinvent Glenn’s universe wasn’t his history with those bands. It was something more direct. In the early ’80s, Pajo had the chance to tour with Glenn Danzig when he formed Samhain. He learned the songs firsthand. He knows them from the inside, not from the outside.

Glenn is someone who not only knows how to write great songs but also how to reinterpret them. That compositional strength is precisely what allows his material to survive such a radical transformation. What he originally wrote as furious anthems, Pajo turns into intimate confessions loaded with painful vulnerability. The album’s acoustic spell reveals something the original volume concealed: the horror in Glenn’s songs was never in the music. It was in the words.

Recorded more than two decades ago, the atmosphere of Scream With Me brings to mind Pink Moon by Nick Drake. That same extreme anguish, that same solitude somehow captured on tape. At times, it also echoes Will Oldham, that same Will Oldham who took the iconic black and white photograph for the cover of Spiderland by Slint, where Pajo himself appears, swimming in a flooded quarry on a sunny afternoon from which Oldham stole the color.

Scream With Me also shares something spiritual with the sonic art of outsiders like Skip Spence, Daniel Johnston, or Jandek. But what ultimately defines it is something else. What defines it best is what we might call folk horror. Scream With Me is a hidden treasure of which very few copies ever surfaced. A confession, a tribute, a reflection that, for the most part, remains in the shadows.