Scary music--about frigging time
Everybody swings on Christmas, but not me. Halloween is, without a doubt, my favorite holiday. I've loved it ever since I was a little kid, and its been one of the few moments that I associate with innocence of youth that I've carried with me into this tenuous terror called adulthood.
It's atmosphere more than anything else. I guess it's the same with Christmas too, but around Halloween, there's definitely a feeling in the air, and all you have to do is prick up your ears and listen for it. It's especially palpable here in New England, where the golden leaves reflect the sunlight in colors you don't see any other time, and where the hills, forests, and rivers have given rise to so much great atmospheric literature (Hawthorne, Poe, and my man H.P. Lovecraft).
I play on that atmosphere every year. I readjust my world in small ways to better attune me to it. I watch certain movies, I read certain books, and more than anything else, I listen to music.
This list represents the contents of a mixtape that I made in 2000, right around Halloween. At the time it represented the spookiest songs in my record collection. I'd probably make changes now, but given that it represents a moment in time, designed to capture an atmosphere, it's kind of taken on a life of its own, and I don't know if I'd dare mess it up. I put this tape in a walkman and wandered around the North End of Boston on Halloween night, past Copp's hill cemetary, down the winding European streets and along the waterfront. Everytime I hear any of these songs, I go back there.
1.)"Good morning Captain"
by Slint
Maybe one of the most perfectly crafted pieces of art I've ever had the pleasure to experience. Someday I'll finish my essay on Slint's album Spiderland, and what they mean to me, but for right now, suffice it to say, this is a ghost story, to kick off my collection ghost stories (to greater or lesser extent), and it's the best. A sea captain crashes his ship, killing the crew. As he laments his fate, alone in the ocean, he begins to see things—a door rising from the sea, an empty house, a child who may be dead speaking to him. All the while, the music tense and tight, building and falling, building and falling until the ocean of the last few chords and the screams wash the whole scene out of existence. What a band. What a song.
2.)Big Empty
by Stone Temple Pilots
I can take or leave the chorus of this song, but the slide guitar reminds me of the beginning of Pirates of the Carribbean at Disneyland, where you're riding through the swamp, listening to the sounds of crickets and backwoods musicians who know that you're going somewhere dangerous. The other great moment is the breakdown after the second chorus, a whirlpool rising from the depths, engulfing you. Note in both cases, Scott Weilland is not singing. Sorry man, but sometimes songs are better when you sit them out.
3.)Riding
by The Palace Brothers
As a template for Will Oldham's later work in Bonnie Prince Billy, this song works. As a frightening morality play about incest and death and desire, it works beautifully. The guys from Slint are actually the backup band here (no surprise, given the ambience of the recording and the musicianship). When Oldham screams “I'm long since dead, and I live in hell”, you can here the soul he represents screeching and warning the living not to make the same mistake.
4.)As You Said
by Joy Division, performed by Tortoise
I'm cursed with a problem— I have a really hard time enjoying music unless the production blows me away. It has to sound full and filling, for me to get lost in it. It's for this reason that, try as I might, I've never been able to get into Joy Division. I think they would scoff at my desire, intent as they were on portraying the world as a fragile, crystaline thing. This song is instrumental, and doesn't have any of the manic nihilism that characterizes Ian Curtis's lyrics. Plus, it's performed by Tortoise, on a JD tribute I bought a few years ago. They turn the song into a bubbling, electronic, gradual decay, and the single note melody is like a pulse from a dead planet floating black and alone in space.
5.)Baby Did a bad bad thing
by Chris Isaak
I've been told that Chris Isaak is basically some great songs in a sea of filler. But what a song this is—if he had an album of stuff like this, I'd be all over it. As such, I got this song where a lot of people did—from Stanley Kubrick's final opus Eyes Wide Shut. The smokey rockabilly-delay intro is like a car driving off into the night, and then Chris tells us that “Baby did a bad bad thing/and I feel like crying”. He never says what she does, but it must've been something awful—certainly its a betrayal of his love, and it maybe something worse. In the movie, it functions to heighten the tension between Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman, but it stands on its own as a creepy testament to what love can make us do, or even forgive.
6.)Glenn by Slint
Slint pops up way too much on this tape, but that's because they epitomize to me how great music can be, and what kinds of sensastions it can inspire. Plus, they make some sounds that most of us have never heard on a record album—whispers, screeches, and that strange vibration during the chorus of this song. The melody of the verse could almost be a voice, but whatever story it's telling is most surely a little mad. Something is rotten in the state of Spiderland.
7.)Curse of Milhaven
by Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds
Nick Cave used to raise all kinds of real hell in his original band The Birthday Party, quite possibly the scariest coterie of freaks ever to make an album, with the possible exception of the Stooges. People say that he mellowed out (re: kicked heroin) when he started the Bad Seeds, but one listen to this song, or the entire Murder Ballads album and you know you're in something frightening. I like to think of this song as the polka that will be playing at the gates of hell. The best line: when the murdering child has finally been caught and begins her confession, she comes out with this frightening description of herself... “my eyes ain't green and my hair ain't yellow/ it's more like the other way around/ I've got a pretty little mouth underneath all the foaming”. The bad seed indeed.
8.)Salo
by The For Carnation
After Slint broke up, the guys all went their separate ways, but Brian McMahon took the torch (or maybe the ember) of Spiderland and formed The For Carnation, which makes even Slint's music sound pleasant and unmenacing by comparison. This song is on their album Marshmallows, and its essentially a series of frightening viniettes, culminating in what appears to be a rape. All through the song, a single musical note pulses like a submarine ping in the deepest ocean, or maybe a satelite, sending out its last information on a dying battery in the dead of empty space. It's a message of something, but like all great art, it demands our attention because of its ambiguity and because we have to meet it to interpret. The only problem is that we may be horrified by what we end up seeing.
9.)Red Right Hand
by Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds
The problem with making a scary music tape is that some bands have made their careers on scaring the crap out of us. Slint and its progeny did this well, and nobody has mastered the macabre (and also redemption) better than Nick Cave. A lot of people know this song from Scream, and it worked well for that movie, but this is a song that's really old testament, trials-of-Christ type stuff. It's like a legend that hoboes and broken junkies might tell each other over a barrel fire, or maybe two men in prison talking about their lives. Satan, with his red right hand (this is an image from John Milton, apparently), is behind it all, and is constantly teaching us that the worst aspects of humanity come not from the evils that men do, but the greed and desire that they feel.
10.)I put a spell on you
by Screamin' Jay Hawkins, performed by Marilyn Manson
Ok, ok, don't switch off your computer just yet. I know there are far better versions of this song (including the original by Screaming Jay Hawkins, who was probably the original Marilyn Manson of his day), but it's not so much the song that's great as the way the band took to it. When the drums come in, pounding out a sailing rhythm for the galley slaves, it almost sounds like the dead have come up and are marching toward the city. Say what you want about Manson's voice, but at least the guy is somewhat expressive, and when he screams, you can feel it in your bones. When he starts yelping out “you, you, you!!!” it sounds like he's got his love taped to a chair in front of him, and every syllable is the wave of a sharp kitchen knife. Also, Twiggy pulled a great solo out of his ass for this one. If the lyrics are a stalker's diary, the guitar is his car, pealing away into the night after the horror has been concluded. For all the stupid shit he's done, I'll never begrudge Manson for this song.
11.)For Dinner
by Slint
Though part of Slint's magic was the whispers of stories that Brian McMahon would tell, just barely audibly, my favorite Slint song has no words. Not that it really matters, because the energy of this song is so palpable that you could tell any story and the song will take it away from you and transform it. It's dark and rumbling, and walking through Boston on Halloween nights, I would find myself looking over my shoulder at every turn to make sure I wasn't being followed. By the time the single guitar line subsides at the end of the song, you feel like something has happened, but you don't know what. Resolution is the wrong word, but maybe acceptance? Damnit—now I'm trying to tell a story over what is essentially a tone poem. Slint does it again.
12.)Wandering Star
by Portishead
I once heard a Portishead track without Beth Gibbons voice, and it was all I could do to not turn it off after ten seconds. She belongs there, and she makes her presence known at every turn. I have no clue what this song is about, but the imagery—stars, darkness, empty husks—send it into the realm of the frightening. Maybe it's just lonliness—the feeling that you're like a star, casting about the blackness of space, and nothing is around you, nothing speaks to you. Of course, as soon as I start thinking about floating silently in space for all eternity, I turn on every light in the house and call everyone I know, just to have some human contact.
13.)Musica Ricercata No. 2
by Dominic Harlan
This is the first track from the Eyes Wide Shut soundtrack. Lots of people got annoyed with it, but I dare you, double dog dare you, to turn all the lights off and listen to it all the way through. I've never been able to do it. Every time that high piano note comes in after the long silence, I jump up and hit the stop button.
14.)Stuck in Here
by Filter
This is one of two acoustic numbers on Filter's first record Short Bus. I have no illusions about liking Filter anymore, but this first record (it also has “Hey man Nice Shot” on it) is really good. This song sounds like an old record player, and has a kind of surreal quality to it—the melody is just a little too off-kilter to be anything other than a dream, or a prelude to a nightmare.
15.)Don, A Man
by Slint
This is the last time, I promise! The only acoustic number on Spiderland, this was the first Slint song I sat down and learned how to play. It's essentially two songs held together by a bizarre narrative about partying, alienation, and driving way too fast. It's got some great lines too: “/like swimming underwater in the darkness/like walking through an empty house/speaking to an imaginary audience/he watched from outside”.
I won't say much about it, except that when the distortion comes in, you will jump out of your seat. If that doesn't convince all you bored music lovers to pick up Spiderland, you need some shock therapy.
16.)House full of Garbage
by Shellac
Shellac has dabbled with creepiness through the twisted metallic grind of their albums, but this song stands out in part because it never actually goes anywhere. There's no loud chorus, or a dramatic build up. The song actually ends with (I kid you not) about three minutes of Todd Trainer banging out single hits on drums. I threw this song on the tape because as a kid, I used to have nightmares about abandoned houses full of garbage. I still don't know why the image is so visceral to me, but every time I hear this song, I think of waking up screaming as a little kid, after dreaming about falling through the floor onto a dirty mattress piled high with garbage, and knowing that I was lost forever.
17.)Story
by Tool
I had to close with this. It's after the hidden track on Undertow, and it's also the last sounds that appear on that album, aside from some general cricket noise. Supposedly Maynard received this story/poem/suicide note on his answering machine, and felt it warranted inclusion on the album. I don't know what it's about, really, but the imagery gives me goosebumps, and if I'm listening to this at home, I lock all the doors when it ends. God help me if I'm outside.
What this story, and the rest of the songs make clear is that Lovecraft was right—the supernatural, the unknown, the ambiguous, and the undefinable are so frightening and horrifying to us in part because we have no way of categorizing what they tell us. It's cliché to say that the best scary movies don't show the monster, but it's not because the monster isn't there, it's because we have to engage our minds in what is going on. We are asked, on Halloween and anytime we get the shit scared of us, to entertain the possibilities of our own imaginations, and all great art succeeds, in one way or another, of engaging them to a greater or lesser degree. Hopefully these songs are no exception. If you want to recommend any other scary-assed music for my next year mix tape, I'd love to hear about it.
It's atmosphere more than anything else. I guess it's the same with Christmas too, but around Halloween, there's definitely a feeling in the air, and all you have to do is prick up your ears and listen for it. It's especially palpable here in New England, where the golden leaves reflect the sunlight in colors you don't see any other time, and where the hills, forests, and rivers have given rise to so much great atmospheric literature (Hawthorne, Poe, and my man H.P. Lovecraft).
I play on that atmosphere every year. I readjust my world in small ways to better attune me to it. I watch certain movies, I read certain books, and more than anything else, I listen to music.
This list represents the contents of a mixtape that I made in 2000, right around Halloween. At the time it represented the spookiest songs in my record collection. I'd probably make changes now, but given that it represents a moment in time, designed to capture an atmosphere, it's kind of taken on a life of its own, and I don't know if I'd dare mess it up. I put this tape in a walkman and wandered around the North End of Boston on Halloween night, past Copp's hill cemetary, down the winding European streets and along the waterfront. Everytime I hear any of these songs, I go back there.
1.)"Good morning Captain"
by Slint
Maybe one of the most perfectly crafted pieces of art I've ever had the pleasure to experience. Someday I'll finish my essay on Slint's album Spiderland, and what they mean to me, but for right now, suffice it to say, this is a ghost story, to kick off my collection ghost stories (to greater or lesser extent), and it's the best. A sea captain crashes his ship, killing the crew. As he laments his fate, alone in the ocean, he begins to see things—a door rising from the sea, an empty house, a child who may be dead speaking to him. All the while, the music tense and tight, building and falling, building and falling until the ocean of the last few chords and the screams wash the whole scene out of existence. What a band. What a song.
2.)Big Empty
by Stone Temple Pilots
I can take or leave the chorus of this song, but the slide guitar reminds me of the beginning of Pirates of the Carribbean at Disneyland, where you're riding through the swamp, listening to the sounds of crickets and backwoods musicians who know that you're going somewhere dangerous. The other great moment is the breakdown after the second chorus, a whirlpool rising from the depths, engulfing you. Note in both cases, Scott Weilland is not singing. Sorry man, but sometimes songs are better when you sit them out.
3.)Riding
by The Palace Brothers
As a template for Will Oldham's later work in Bonnie Prince Billy, this song works. As a frightening morality play about incest and death and desire, it works beautifully. The guys from Slint are actually the backup band here (no surprise, given the ambience of the recording and the musicianship). When Oldham screams “I'm long since dead, and I live in hell”, you can here the soul he represents screeching and warning the living not to make the same mistake.
4.)As You Said
by Joy Division, performed by Tortoise
I'm cursed with a problem— I have a really hard time enjoying music unless the production blows me away. It has to sound full and filling, for me to get lost in it. It's for this reason that, try as I might, I've never been able to get into Joy Division. I think they would scoff at my desire, intent as they were on portraying the world as a fragile, crystaline thing. This song is instrumental, and doesn't have any of the manic nihilism that characterizes Ian Curtis's lyrics. Plus, it's performed by Tortoise, on a JD tribute I bought a few years ago. They turn the song into a bubbling, electronic, gradual decay, and the single note melody is like a pulse from a dead planet floating black and alone in space.
5.)Baby Did a bad bad thing
by Chris Isaak
I've been told that Chris Isaak is basically some great songs in a sea of filler. But what a song this is—if he had an album of stuff like this, I'd be all over it. As such, I got this song where a lot of people did—from Stanley Kubrick's final opus Eyes Wide Shut. The smokey rockabilly-delay intro is like a car driving off into the night, and then Chris tells us that “Baby did a bad bad thing/and I feel like crying”. He never says what she does, but it must've been something awful—certainly its a betrayal of his love, and it maybe something worse. In the movie, it functions to heighten the tension between Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman, but it stands on its own as a creepy testament to what love can make us do, or even forgive.
6.)Glenn by Slint
Slint pops up way too much on this tape, but that's because they epitomize to me how great music can be, and what kinds of sensastions it can inspire. Plus, they make some sounds that most of us have never heard on a record album—whispers, screeches, and that strange vibration during the chorus of this song. The melody of the verse could almost be a voice, but whatever story it's telling is most surely a little mad. Something is rotten in the state of Spiderland.
7.)Curse of Milhaven
by Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds
Nick Cave used to raise all kinds of real hell in his original band The Birthday Party, quite possibly the scariest coterie of freaks ever to make an album, with the possible exception of the Stooges. People say that he mellowed out (re: kicked heroin) when he started the Bad Seeds, but one listen to this song, or the entire Murder Ballads album and you know you're in something frightening. I like to think of this song as the polka that will be playing at the gates of hell. The best line: when the murdering child has finally been caught and begins her confession, she comes out with this frightening description of herself... “my eyes ain't green and my hair ain't yellow/ it's more like the other way around/ I've got a pretty little mouth underneath all the foaming”. The bad seed indeed.
8.)Salo
by The For Carnation
After Slint broke up, the guys all went their separate ways, but Brian McMahon took the torch (or maybe the ember) of Spiderland and formed The For Carnation, which makes even Slint's music sound pleasant and unmenacing by comparison. This song is on their album Marshmallows, and its essentially a series of frightening viniettes, culminating in what appears to be a rape. All through the song, a single musical note pulses like a submarine ping in the deepest ocean, or maybe a satelite, sending out its last information on a dying battery in the dead of empty space. It's a message of something, but like all great art, it demands our attention because of its ambiguity and because we have to meet it to interpret. The only problem is that we may be horrified by what we end up seeing.
9.)Red Right Hand
by Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds
The problem with making a scary music tape is that some bands have made their careers on scaring the crap out of us. Slint and its progeny did this well, and nobody has mastered the macabre (and also redemption) better than Nick Cave. A lot of people know this song from Scream, and it worked well for that movie, but this is a song that's really old testament, trials-of-Christ type stuff. It's like a legend that hoboes and broken junkies might tell each other over a barrel fire, or maybe two men in prison talking about their lives. Satan, with his red right hand (this is an image from John Milton, apparently), is behind it all, and is constantly teaching us that the worst aspects of humanity come not from the evils that men do, but the greed and desire that they feel.
10.)I put a spell on you
by Screamin' Jay Hawkins, performed by Marilyn Manson
Ok, ok, don't switch off your computer just yet. I know there are far better versions of this song (including the original by Screaming Jay Hawkins, who was probably the original Marilyn Manson of his day), but it's not so much the song that's great as the way the band took to it. When the drums come in, pounding out a sailing rhythm for the galley slaves, it almost sounds like the dead have come up and are marching toward the city. Say what you want about Manson's voice, but at least the guy is somewhat expressive, and when he screams, you can feel it in your bones. When he starts yelping out “you, you, you!!!” it sounds like he's got his love taped to a chair in front of him, and every syllable is the wave of a sharp kitchen knife. Also, Twiggy pulled a great solo out of his ass for this one. If the lyrics are a stalker's diary, the guitar is his car, pealing away into the night after the horror has been concluded. For all the stupid shit he's done, I'll never begrudge Manson for this song.
11.)For Dinner
by Slint
Though part of Slint's magic was the whispers of stories that Brian McMahon would tell, just barely audibly, my favorite Slint song has no words. Not that it really matters, because the energy of this song is so palpable that you could tell any story and the song will take it away from you and transform it. It's dark and rumbling, and walking through Boston on Halloween nights, I would find myself looking over my shoulder at every turn to make sure I wasn't being followed. By the time the single guitar line subsides at the end of the song, you feel like something has happened, but you don't know what. Resolution is the wrong word, but maybe acceptance? Damnit—now I'm trying to tell a story over what is essentially a tone poem. Slint does it again.
12.)Wandering Star
by Portishead
I once heard a Portishead track without Beth Gibbons voice, and it was all I could do to not turn it off after ten seconds. She belongs there, and she makes her presence known at every turn. I have no clue what this song is about, but the imagery—stars, darkness, empty husks—send it into the realm of the frightening. Maybe it's just lonliness—the feeling that you're like a star, casting about the blackness of space, and nothing is around you, nothing speaks to you. Of course, as soon as I start thinking about floating silently in space for all eternity, I turn on every light in the house and call everyone I know, just to have some human contact.
13.)Musica Ricercata No. 2
by Dominic Harlan
This is the first track from the Eyes Wide Shut soundtrack. Lots of people got annoyed with it, but I dare you, double dog dare you, to turn all the lights off and listen to it all the way through. I've never been able to do it. Every time that high piano note comes in after the long silence, I jump up and hit the stop button.
14.)Stuck in Here
by Filter
This is one of two acoustic numbers on Filter's first record Short Bus. I have no illusions about liking Filter anymore, but this first record (it also has “Hey man Nice Shot” on it) is really good. This song sounds like an old record player, and has a kind of surreal quality to it—the melody is just a little too off-kilter to be anything other than a dream, or a prelude to a nightmare.
15.)Don, A Man
by Slint
This is the last time, I promise! The only acoustic number on Spiderland, this was the first Slint song I sat down and learned how to play. It's essentially two songs held together by a bizarre narrative about partying, alienation, and driving way too fast. It's got some great lines too: “/like swimming underwater in the darkness/like walking through an empty house/speaking to an imaginary audience/he watched from outside”.
I won't say much about it, except that when the distortion comes in, you will jump out of your seat. If that doesn't convince all you bored music lovers to pick up Spiderland, you need some shock therapy.
16.)House full of Garbage
by Shellac
Shellac has dabbled with creepiness through the twisted metallic grind of their albums, but this song stands out in part because it never actually goes anywhere. There's no loud chorus, or a dramatic build up. The song actually ends with (I kid you not) about three minutes of Todd Trainer banging out single hits on drums. I threw this song on the tape because as a kid, I used to have nightmares about abandoned houses full of garbage. I still don't know why the image is so visceral to me, but every time I hear this song, I think of waking up screaming as a little kid, after dreaming about falling through the floor onto a dirty mattress piled high with garbage, and knowing that I was lost forever.
17.)Story
by Tool
I had to close with this. It's after the hidden track on Undertow, and it's also the last sounds that appear on that album, aside from some general cricket noise. Supposedly Maynard received this story/poem/suicide note on his answering machine, and felt it warranted inclusion on the album. I don't know what it's about, really, but the imagery gives me goosebumps, and if I'm listening to this at home, I lock all the doors when it ends. God help me if I'm outside.
What this story, and the rest of the songs make clear is that Lovecraft was right—the supernatural, the unknown, the ambiguous, and the undefinable are so frightening and horrifying to us in part because we have no way of categorizing what they tell us. It's cliché to say that the best scary movies don't show the monster, but it's not because the monster isn't there, it's because we have to engage our minds in what is going on. We are asked, on Halloween and anytime we get the shit scared of us, to entertain the possibilities of our own imaginations, and all great art succeeds, in one way or another, of engaging them to a greater or lesser degree. Hopefully these songs are no exception. If you want to recommend any other scary-assed music for my next year mix tape, I'd love to hear about it.
posted by whenelvisdied at 2:46 PM
1 Comments:
Hey dude, some of these songs indeed take me back. But damn, where was this list a month ago? I would have thrown together a a playlist.
I vividly remember driving through the Black Hills with you a few years ago and listening to selections from this list. It wasn't Halloween, but the Hills have a very creepy quality to them that bring out the best in this list.
Cheers.
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