Threnody is a play off the Polish composer Penderecki’s Threnody: for the victims of Hiroshima which will take your head off. Easily the music that would lead the “scares the crap out of you” sub-genre, but since it is not rock, I didn’t mention it…
Word. I shat myself the first time I heard Larks’ Tongues In Aspic Part I (and Part II, for that matter.
[hijack] Saw a cracking Adrian Belew solo show last week - AB and a rhythm section. Awesome. [/hijack]
Otherwise, I second Nick Cave - especially Mercy Seat.
Oh, man, I could go on and on.
Friends by Led Zeppelin. I’d vote this as the most ominous song ever, actually. The minor chords, manic guitar picking and deep evil-sounding string section. The first time I heard this song I was driving on the highway with the largest and darkest storm I had ever seen overhead. Wow…
Nobody has feared Rock n’ Roll since the 60’s.
You should be fearing Hip-Hop nowadays. Get with the times man, sheesh.
Nirvana’s version of “Where Did You Sleep Last Night.”
“Climbing Up the Walls” by Radiohead is very creepy. The lyrics are almost impossible to understand, and the imagery is surreal once you understand them.
“Possum Kingdom” by the Toadies is about a guy who’s planning to murder some girl, and the scary part is how incredibly sexy the song is.
“Possum Kingdom” by the Toadies is about a guy who’s planning to murder some girl, and the scary part is how incredibly sexy the song is.
OP by Mirror Image egamI rorriM
I second this one…to me, the scary part is that this is one of my absolute favorite songs.
I can promise you
You’ll stay as beautiful
With dark hair
And soft skin…forever
Forever
<shudder>
Did you guys read 31 songs? The chapter about Suicide’s epic “Frankie Teardrop” was a good read. And yes, it’s as frightening as the book will have it. The song goes on for ten minutes, it’s maddening and narrative: Frankie Teardrop gets closer to killing his family the more you listen and by the end of the song the singer starts banshee shrieking. Powerful mighty, as Kunta Kinte would have said.
Meat Is Murder by The Smiths. The piano stabs with the sound of the bone saw… the mooing of the cows… it never creeped me out until I was listening in the office… at night… with only the lamp on.
On the other hand, Metallica’s One is laying it on a bit thick, isn’t it?
Reality Chuck
Wow someone actually remembers “DOA” by Bloodrock?
I believe that was Terry Knight’s third incarnation as rock and roll performer / promoter. (The first 2 being Terry Knight & the Pack and Grand Funk Railroad)
Killers, the second Iron Maiden album. It’s basically about a man who finds two girls murdered, and then is wrongfully accused of the crime (Murders In The Rue Morgue), then a few songs about life as a fugitive (Another Life, Innocent Exile), then the title track is a graphic description of more murders, and the narrator realizes that he did commit the crimes he was accused of, and then the rest of the album he tries to make sense of it all. If you read the lyrics, it’s obvious that the narrator is schizophrenic. Best…Maiden album…EVER!
Well that needs to change then!
Great nominees by all, BTW. It’s been a looooooong time since I listened to any K.C., even though I’m a great admirer of Fripp’s chops. Should go dig some up…
What’s the one about the guy in the car accident and he looks over at some girl who was killed??? [Now that I check the D.O.A. lyrics it seems very similar] All I remember is:
“Car accident, accident victim, <we have a donor>…”
As a kid “A Day in the Life” (especially the “aaahhhh” part) and “Knights in White Satin” would make me turn the radio off at night. I recently heard maybe 30 seconds of some unknown Norwegian death metal song and was ready to kill someone, nothing is more creepy than one of those songs
As a kid, “Blue Jay Way” from the Beatles’s Magical Mystery Tour album creeped me out. Ominous lyrics, dirge-like cadence, mysterious noises that seemed just at the edge of my hearing:
“There’s a fog upon L.A.
And my friends have lost their way
We’ll be over soon they said
Now they’ve lost themselves instead
Please don’t be long please don’t you be very long
Please don’t be long for I may be asleep…”
It doesn’t scare me anymore, but I still don’t like it much.
My sister and I used to freak each other out by playing the intro to Meatloaf’s “You took the Words Right Out of My Mouth (Hot Summer Night)” , but that was years ago.
More recently I was driving home late at night with the radio playing on some rock station when the song “Lunatic Fringe” started by Red Rider.
That is one creepy intro…
About that Scandanavian Death Metal stuff…
In grad school one guy I knew was a total metal animal. He rather consciously looked like a long-haired Satan, and wore Megadeath T-Shirts and spikey accessories well into his 20s, last I knew. He said he didn’t like Death Metal because it was too freaky. When I expressed surprise at the idea that he’d find anything too freaky, he put it this way: “That shit is like the difference between a good horror flick and the next installment of Faces of Death. Even I have standards, man.”
So, is Death Metal shit-scary in a bad way, or a good way?
I find Death Metal to be annoying more than anything else.
I like the music, heavy guitar, heavy drums… very crunchy, very hard.
And then a guy comes on and starts grunting and growing into a mic.
Occasionally you can make out a word (usually like “death” “suicide” 'blood" “satan”) but since it’s out of context, it’s annoying.
So I find myself to be going “Meh” whenever my brother starts going on about the hot new band he’s found “necrophage” or whatever the hell he’s going on about.
Scandanavian death metal is scary in a bad bad way. And a lot of those bands are bad dudes “for real”, not in a pretend way like most bands of that ilk. Some of those guys have been institutionalized, murdered, burned chuches, etc. they are definitely not posers. Check out the Wikipedia articles on such bands as Mayhem, Emperor, Immortal, etc. and prepare to be freaked out.
I like a lot of the metal coming out of northern Europe, but my younger brother is into way heavier stuff for me. He once handed me a CD called From Wisdom to Hate by a band called Gorguts and told me to listen to the title track.
Scared the ever loving shit out of me. Here are some choice lyrics: