Playlist: Scary Music

"The mythic horror movie, like the sick joke, has a dirty job to do. It deliberately appeals to all that is worst in us. It is morbidity unchained, our most base instincts let free, our nastiest fantasies realized...lifting a trap door in the civilized forebrain and throwing a basket of raw meat to the hungry alligators swimming around in that subterranean river beneath" - Stephen King

Regardless of what you think about Stephen King as an author, the man at least understands the psychology behind what he does. The "alligators" that King speaks of are the darker parts of our psyche. And while I disagree with the idea that we must indulge them to keep sane, I do believe that they need to be indulged all the same. Everyone has a way of sating their secret dark side. Unsurprisingly, I listen to music. Scary music.

I don't say that to be edgy. Nor, for that matter, did most of these artists make these songs to be edgy. When you get down to brass tax, music is just another form of art. And art has always been used to convey horror. Goya painted it, Romero put it on film, Lovecraft wrote it and groups like Throbbing Gristle recorded it. Despite their macabre, bizarre intonations, each of these songs is an excellent piece of art. And like all good art invoking fear, they entertain, discomfort and intrigue all at the same time.

The following songs are scary. They were designed to make listeners nervous and uncomfortable. Each goes about it in a different way, but all of them are very effective in one form or another. Some of them go for pronounced "jump" scares, while others use disturbing themes to get into listeners' minds. The best of them use their arrangements to create a disquieting atmosphere, and the lyrics whip the imagination into a frenzy. Either way, counting down, here are some of the scariest songs I've privileged to hear.

7. Subway Song by the Cure

Prior to 1982's Pornography, most of the Cure's catalog was pretty sanitary stuff. The one run they made at doing anything truly frightening was the closing track on side one of their debut album, and it's fairly cheap scares at that. I'll let you listen to the song to figure out why. The song details a woman walking home at night from a subway. She notices that footsteps are following her, but she's too scared to confront them. The minimalist melody feature arrhythmic guitar chords and a steady baseline to replicate the footsteps. "Subway Song" is tense, building the illusion that something awful is going to happen by the end of the track. It does. Despite being something of a cheap thrill, "Subway Song" is damned effective at freaking the absolute piss out of anyone who's never heard it before.

6. Pirate Jenny by Nina Simone

"Pirate Jenny" is a song from the 1928 music Tenpenny Opera, and was meant to be little more than the private fantasies of a maid. Nine Simone's 1964 cover, however...that's something else. Recorded at a time when African Americans could literally be killed for registering to vote, Simone channeled her rage at current affairs into a cover not implicitly, but unmistakably aimed at white America. Accompanied by a spooky, saloon style piano, Simone's emotions oscillate between broiling rage, bloodlusty satisfaction and gleeful madness as she leads pirates to the town's sack and slaughter. If her proclamation, "That'll learn ya!" and the carnage that precede it don't send chills up your spine, I don't know what's wrong with you.

(Note: While this isn't the scariest song on this list, per say, it is definitely the best. Ballads sung this well and emoting so masterfully are hard to come by)

5. Misery's the River of the World by Tom Waits

When it comes to frightening music, the question is not whether T-Waits songs are scary enough for consideration, but which one of the plethora of options is scariest. There are so many good choices that it's hard to nail one down. This song, though, is the one that plays when you enter Hell. It's a long rant about how fucked up the world is set to a psychotic carnival melody that never manages to be melodic enough to not to terrify. Waits is in full snarl mode on this track, growling out his condemnations of mankind with gleeful abandon. While kids check their closets for the Boogie Man, the Boogie Man checks his for Tom Waits.

4. We Drive East by Death in June

This song is as brilliant as it is unsettling. It details the hapless civilians caught between the totalitarian Soviets and the brutal Nazis during the battle of Stalingrad. A trumpet acting as a war horn and marching drum play in the background while two singers trade licks; one singing about the mindless Nazi drive to eradicate human life and the other the perpetual meat grinder that the communists threw themselves into. The lyrical themes fit the chaotic, discordant music perfectly to create a disturbing anthem for the human toll that war takes on the people who deserve it least.

3. Facing the Wind by Nico

This is not the Nico from "Sunday Morning". It's the Nico from "Venus in Furs". On this track, the lyrics are not the creep stars, even in the slightest. The "it" she's singing about having a hold on her could be mean anything, so it's not so bad. The music, however, is terrifying. I would love to tell you what that medley of instruments is, but the truth is that there's so much insanity going on there, that I have no earthly idea. An accordion, maybe? Something that makes a howling sound, anyway. Listening to this song gives me the creeps because there's something about it that just feels wrong. That something being everything about it. This is un-music, and scary in the same way that monsters in Lovecraft stories defy geometry.

2. Hamburger Lady by Throbbing Gristle

(Note: I was going to talk about the song "Slug Bait" here by the same band, but every time I sat down to write about it, I found myself too uncomfortable to get through the entry. If you want to hear the song that's too disturbing for me to even listen to all the way through, much less write about, you can find it here. Just don't say I didn't warn you.)

If someone tells you that electronic music can't be scary, they're full of shit. At the very least, they've never heard Throbbing Gristle. TG has long made horror a part of its shtick, and damn few artists do it better than them. At least "Hamburger Lady" is one of their less disturbing songs lyrically, and it's about a burn victim. Not that you can really tell. The heavy, siren-like bass and distorted whatever-the-hell-you-call-that-ringing-nightmare  make the rather subdued vocals nigh impossible to understand. This is some serious horror film music.

1. Hello Skinny by the Residents

Horror is a funny thing. If the Beatles had done this song, it just would have been a cute little ditty about a re-salesman. Instead, it was done by a band that looks like this. And this. And a few times, this. They describe themselves as an "art collective", which is apparently how they started saying "Nightmare Factory" back in the 70s. The Residents do scary music the same way Germans make cars; very well, and with frightening efficiency. From their screeching avant-garde cover of "(I Can't Get No) Satisfaction" to the aptly name "Die in Terror", the group is no stranger to making skins crawl.

"Oh, hai!"

But if you ask me, the band was best at terror when they kept it simple. "Hello Skinny" is simple. And boy howdy is it terrifying. Unlike most of their work, "Skinny" is driven by a clarinet  and a bass guitar. The resulting nightmarish sound is matched by the singer's menacing vocal performance (and I say "the singer" because even after 40 odd years recording, nobody has ever seen the band's faces, or knows who they are behind the eyeball masks. Just let the thought that the person sitting next to you could be a Resident sink in for a second). And all of that is done for a song about what, exactly? A grizzly murder? A psychopath in an asylum?

Nope. Just a skinny dude who sells Louis Armstrong records to truckers. Perhaps what makes this song scarier than anything is the anticipation. Both the music and the vocals lead you to believe that something awful is going to happen the whole time, but it never does. Unless, of course, you count the maniac chant at the end, which could just be a warped vinyl, or could be someone getting the holy shit murdered out of them.

It's really up to the listener.


Anyway, that's my rundown of songs that you can scare the shit out of yourself with this Halloween. Sweet dreams everyone!

Playlist: Halloween Themes

The celebration begins!

I've decided to kick off my four post Halloween-a-thon with something nice, light and general. As I stated in my last blog, Halloween music exists more in spirit than tradition. It's a feeling. Whether it's a song like "This is Halloween" that catches the aesthetics, or one that simply sounds spooky, Halloween music is all about capitalizing on a mood. There's a reason that "Tubular Bells" becomes super popular this time of year; it sound scary as shit and it reminds us that The Exorcist was a thing.

So for this addition to my playlists, I'm trying to hone in on those perfect, Halloween party songs. This will hardly be a comprehensive list. It's more of a rundown of some of my personal favorites. I also won't be including a few classics like "Thriller" because honestly, what's the point? I enjoy sharing music that other people might not have heard before rather than beating to death songs of which there's nothing more to be said.

So, starting chronologically...

1. Nightmare by Artie Shaw (1938)

Being an old jazz number doesn't stop Shaw's seminal work from being spooky as all hell. The rhythmic drumbeat and clarinet line that form the song's backbone, coupled with an aggressive brass section help this song create atmosphere that says "something awful is about to happen". For an era in which music was so sanitized, Shaw's tune really stands out as unique simply for the audacity of what it was trying to do and the creativity with which it went about doing it. That's probably why he adopted it as his signature song.

2. Downbound Train by Chuck Berry (1955)

It's hard to believe it, but the Godfather of Rock and Roll (who may have also put cameras in women's toilets at one point or another) was once a fiery Southern Baptist.  For the B-side of his fourth single, he brought that obsession with damnation into the recording booth and banged out "Downbound Train"; the tale of a drunk dreaming about his trip on train to Hell. It's hardly shocking or powerful, but Berry brings enough sincerity to it to make it seem spooky.

3. I Put a Spell on You by Screamin' Jay Hawkins (1956)

Screamin' Jay's 1956 classic has long been a Halloween favorite. Rock and roll legend states that Hawkins originally tried to record this song as a more typical blues piece, and it never worked. Then he and the rest of the band showed up at the studio shitfaced drunk to rerecord it, and he viscerally growled out the tune in the guttural fashion that would become one of his trademarks. There have been dozens of covers since, mostly playing the song as a straight ballad. But if you're building a soundtrack to Halloween, accept no substitute.

4. Devil's Grip on Me by the The Crazy World of Arthur Brown (1967)

Like Hawkins, Arthur Brown's performances were always bombastic and colorful. The two artists also shared a love of macabre lyrics and spooky sounds. Hammy though it might be, it's hard to go wrong with Brown for a Halloween choice. This one invokes images of Satan, so I think it's a winner.

5. Bela Lugosi's Dead by Bauhaus (1979)

Bela Lugosi was a larger than life figure in early horror cinema, and had actually been dead for 23 years at the time of this song's recording. None the less, it's a masterful tribute to him. The song features driving percussion accented by bass guitar and dozens of odd, bizarre sound effects and guitar distortions that help create the atmosphere of a horror film. "Bella Lugosi's dead...undead," The song proclaims, "and the bats have left the belltower." It was Bauhaus's first single, and it really established them as the pioneers of goth rock as it emerged in the late 70s.

6. Human Fly by the Cramps (1980)

Bauhaus weren't the only band that studied old horror film. Right there with them were the Cramps, one of my favorite punk bands. Between songs like "Zombie Dance", "I Was a Teenage Werewolf" and "Human Fly", it was obvious from the beginning that campy B-horror was a major part the group's visual and audio aesthetics. The latter of those was written as a loving tribute to b-horror film The Fly (the 1958 original, mind you, not the 1986 Jeff Goldblum one). The song is played in a surf rock style, if surf rock overdosed on acid. At only 2:02, it's far too short for a song this good, but I'm not sure the Cramps were ever very capable of recordings songs over 150 seconds or so.

7. Ghost Town by the Specials (1981)

Ska today has becoming Babbie's First Rock Genre for teenagers everywhere. Now that the stereotype has formed, it's difficult to remember that the genre could once be pretty edgy. Such was the case for the 1981 single "Ghost Town". Though the song is less about supernatural entities and more about modern urban decay, its depiction of crime, violence and the miserable state of poverty stricken cities, sounds decidedly uneasy. This is mostly due to the swinging saxophone that creates the desolate atmosphere on the song.

8. Country Death Song by the Violent Femmes (1985)

The Violent Femmes first album may have made them famous, but for my money it was their second that made them great. The son of a devout Baptist minister (there's a pattern forming here, for the observant among you), frontman Gordon Gano decided that for the second record, the band would play stripped down, gothic country as opposed to acoustic party-punk. The result was a deep, emotive and occasionally creepy album with fervent religious overtones. The album's opening track, Country Death Song, is the confession of a crazed man seeking penance in suicide for the daughter he'd murdered. A simple, bouncing bass backs the song, while veteran banjo picker Tony Trischka creates a desolate, dark country vibe. Gano's own psychotic vocal performance drives home the madness meant in the song.

9. Dead Man's Party by Oingo Boingo (1986)

If there's a song more "80s" than this one, I'm not sure what it is. Cheesy drums and sax? Check. Aggressive synthesizer? Done. Faux gothic affectations? They're all over it. Oingo Boingo and front man Danny Effman (Jack Skellington himself) not only created a distillation of everything that new wave was teased for, but also the perfect Halloween party song short of MJ's "Thriller". Despite all of it's cheesyness, I adore this song. It's too fun not to fall completely in love with.

10. The Curse of Millhaven by Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds (1994)

I've already written extensively about Nick Cave & the Bad Seed's magnus opus Murder Ballads. But it would feel wrong of me to make a list of Halloween music and not include a song from it. The natural choice, both because it's fun and grisly as hell, is "The Curse of Millhaven". The song chronicles the narration of a pretty blonde haired girl named Loretta (though she prefers Lottie) and the small town she lives in. Oh, and 23 people that she viciously murders for her own amusement. Nick Cave inflects that sort of gleeful insanity perfectly in his vocal performance, and the erratic, swinging bass and guitar chords sell it well. Though it might disturb the more faint of heart, this a great song for a Halloween party.

11. The Ghost of Stephen Foster by Squirrel Nut Zipper (1998)

Speaking of fun, nobody does it better than SNZ. "Hell", their biggest hit, was a very tempting choice for this. But ultimately I went for this one instead. This song details a meeting between our anonymous narrator and the spectral version of America's original hitmaker in a spooky old hotel. It's a bizarre, neo-swing tune that would feel right at home being played by a ghost band in a haunted house coming to life. I always got that mental image from it, so I was pleased to find that the video was exactly that. It's right above, and it's one of the most enjoyable music videos ever made. So check it out.

12. God's Away on Business by Tom Waits (2002)

Tom Waits is the indisputable king of Halloween. Between his gravelly, snarling voice, his freaky avante guard hooks and the macabre songwriting he's wont to delve into, there are literally dozens of songs I could choose for a list like this. Not all of his music is like that, of course, but the 2002 album Blood Money certainly qualifies in its entirety. I ultimately went with "God's Away on Business", because it's the record's best and because there's a badass mashup in which Cookie Monster sings it.

13. The Shankhill Butchers by the Decemberists (2006)

There have been so many gory revenge ballads, tales of killers and deeds most foul expressed on Decemberist albums that I actually think that frontman Colin Meloy might be insane. Whether I'm right or not, he's damn good at creating them. Meloy, in this song, plays a mother telling her children a threatening lullaby about the very real historical gang of Irish loyalists. In fiction, they came for disobedient children, with "cleavers and their knives". The whole thing is done in a very minimalist, spooky, understated way that fits the song perfectly.

14. Cannibal Family by the Wolfgangs (2011)

I'm not even going to pretend that I know what this song is about. The lyrics, as far as I can tell, don't exist online and what's-her-name up there's vocals are incomprehensible. But this rockabilly jam sounds dark, and the video implies that it's about people who eat people. That's pretty fuckin' Halloween right there.

15. He of Cloven Hoof by Those Poor Bastards (2012)

If Tom Waits is the King of Halloween, Those Poor Bastards are his princes. TPB plays a tortured, gothic, mutant version of country, or so the theory goes. This song is less country and more "wailing pipe organs from Hell". I first heard it at a truck stop where I fueled up at 3 AM on a drive home, and was shocked at how different it sounded from anything recorded ever. TPB steep their music in pitch black Biblical imagery, southern gothic themes and insanely creepy musical vibes. Some of it borders on hammy, but most of it is genuinely creepy in a way that can make your skin crawl.

So that does it for Halloween list one. To continue the leadup to the holiday, later this week I'll be posting a review of the album of my nightmares; an album so, horrifyingly bad that it chills my very bones. What record could frighten me so? You'll just have to tune into the Weekly Record to find out.