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The Most Frightening Or Unnerving Song

redbone

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There seems to be a number of threads about the most frightening film, thread, book, but does anyone have any song or songs that elicits the heebie-jeebies in them?

I find that Portishead's 'Wandering Star' is particularly freaky and most things by the wonderful BirdEngine.
 
I got the heebie-jeebies listening to the most excellent Infected album by The The.

Yonks ago, I was listening to it and my favourite track Sweet Bird of Truth, which is about a lone, doomed raid by a US bomber plane in the Middle East ... when I turned the CD off and returned to BBC Radio 4, it was announcing the start of the invasion of Iraq! :shock:
 
Listening to Nico's The Marble Index alone in the house used to regularly give me the creeps. Recommended track is the last one: Evening of Light.
 
Portishead nearly give me anxiety attacks each time I hear them. I'm not frightened by their music but get overwhelmed with panic, anxiety and a sense that I have to move or escape. I think it's the tempo and odd timing signatures they use.

Jack Bauer could get me to confess to anything if he strapped me down at a Portishead concert.
 
Miley Cyrus *shudder*

No, but seriously Bach's Toccata & Fugue (in d minor or indeedy any key!)
Due entirely to a very creepy waxwork in Brading waxwork museum on the Isle of Wight. It portrayed a woman laying in bed dying of consumption with her chest rising and falling and the music playing really loudly!!
I was only about 8 years old, left me with a lifelong hatred of waxworks and THAT piece of music.
Thanks parents! :shock:
 
Maviself said:
Miley Cyrus *shudder*

No, but seriously Bach's Toccata & Fugue (in d minor or indeedy any key!)
Due entirely to a very creepy waxwork in Brading waxwork museum on the Isle of Wight. It portrayed a woman laying in bed dying of consumption with her chest rising and falling and the music playing really loudly!!
I was only about 8 years old, left me with a lifelong hatred of waxworks and THAT piece of music.
Thanks parents! :shock:

There was a monk at the organ too, rocking side to side as if playing, there was mirror on the organ and you could see that his face was a skull. Another exhibit was the chimney sweeper boy trapped in the chimney...
 
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My god....I'd forgotten about those, but now you remind me. Or perhaps I'd blanked them from my memory.
If thats what passed for entertainment on the IOW in those days, I'm glad we were only on holiday........ :?
 
redbone said:
There seems to be a number of threads about the most frightening film, thread, book, but does anyone have any song or songs that elicits the heebie-jeebies in them?

We do have a thread about frightening music, but I've no idea where it's gone, somewhere in the Culture bit I think.

My suggestion was Timmy Thomas's Why Can't We Live Together?, which I woke up to on the radio in the middle of the night and it frightened the life out of me. The organ in Toccata and Fugue has nothing on this for chills:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mAvuxLf80Jo
 
If it's faster than a fastish heartbeat and in a genre I dislike I can easily be driven to a panic attack unless I escape it. Most kinds of dance music give me the screaming ab-dabs.
 
"Why Can't We Live Together?" conjures up warm memories of youth for me! It was on the radio often during one of the better times of my life.

I have to admit: I love music, but song lyrics are totally lost on me. I can hear a song a thousand times and not pick up one word of it, so songs with eerie/frightening lyrics don't affect me.

The weirdest s*** I ever heard was probably Pink Floyd's "Several Species of Small, Furry Animals Gathered Together in a Cave and Grooving with a Pict." I only caught snippets of it on TV (they played it to advertise horror movies to be shown on Saturday night on a local station), but the tiny bits I heard freaked me out. The echo-chamber effects put me in mind of an actual Place rather than a recording studio. I envisioned some unimaginable Otherworld inhabited by things that were part demon, part chipmunk, and part Lovecraftian horror. (It's only been a few years since I found the whole song -- and only because I bought a Pink Floyd cd at random.)

If someone had brought me a recording of "Several Species . . ." as a kid or teenager and told me it was an actual example of Electronic Voice Phenomena, I would have a) probably believed them and b) died of shock!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T1tfUaBezFo
 
Riders on the Storm, The Doors. Atmospheric stormy intro and the lines "There's a killer on the road/His brain is squirming like a toad" were pretty intense when I was just a small person!

The War of the Worlds album also freaked me out. :eek!!!!:
 
U-laaah!

amarok2005 said:
"Why Can't We Live Together?" conjures up warm memories of youth for me! It was on the radio often during one of the better times of my life.

Strange how one song can strike two people in completely different ways, it almost goes beyond personal taste. To me it's an incredibly eerie sounding song.
 
wairddeb said:
Riders on the Storm, The Doors. Atmospheric stormy intro and the lines "There's a killer on the road/His brain is squirming like a toad" were pretty intense when I was just a small person!

The War of the Worlds album also freaked me out. :eek!!!!:

I'd agree with The Doors, but I'd go for 'Five to One' as being proper freaky. Totally apocalyptic (as well as spawning the whole "no-one here get's out alive" business), a real stomper, and one of the most threatening (and pissed up) vocal performances I've ever heard.

And big props for Robbie Krieger's first solo - so simple, but so effective.

**edit for syntax. Div!
 
Anything by Burial is pretty freaky, not in a creepy way though.

His stuff sounds like a walk down the dark alleyways of suburbia, late at night, alone....then you here the distant sound of breaking glass, or a cry...

Real 21st century urban horror.


Also, Sixteen Horsepower play some awesome 19th century style gothic Americana - very haunting and evocative.
 
My favourite disturbing Electronica is Meat Beat Manifesto - Samples of mad bits of trivia, theremins, white noise and snippets of half-heard radio transmissions. Plus also a reasonably high Fortean-esqe content. Probably 'Actual Sound + Voices' and 'Subliminal Sandwich' the two creepy albums.

The worst one normally (when I'm on random play) for some reason gets me at 1-2am, when sitting in the dark, alone, reading something disturbing on the internet. Then MBM's 'Mad Bomber/The Woods' always seems to start up. First half is relatively up beat and nice, but the Second part actually makes my hair stand up on the back of my neck. Makes me want to switch off and go and hide under the duvet...
 
gncxx said:
U-laaah!

amarok2005 said:
"Why Can't We Live Together?" conjures up warm memories of youth for me! It was on the radio often during one of the better times of my life.

Strange how one song can strike two people in completely different ways, it almost goes beyond personal taste. To me it's an incredibly eerie sounding song.
I'd never heard that song before - it's great!
 
A song that used to fill my mother with outrage and hate was Paul Anka's 'Having My Baby'. When it was popular she nearly had a heart attack every time it came on t'wireless. :shock:

Got her to calm down one day and explain what what so offensive. It was filthy! All about sex!! :evil:

She'd misinterpreted the title as meaning roughly 'bonking my girlfriend'.
The line 'I'm a woman in love and I love what's going through me' particularly upset her.

She out-Whitehoused Whitehouse that day. I'm so proud. :roll:

I did explain, but I'm still not sure she was convinced.
 
Stravinsky's 'Rites of Spring' at volume gets me quaking. It had a big influence on classic horror film soundtracks too I think.
Or pretty much anything by Throbbing Gristle, particularly the Jim Jones song & 'Hamburger Lady'.
 
Benjamin Britten's Playful Pizzicato freaks me out a bit. I don't know what's supposed to be playful about it, to me it sounds like the incidental music to a film where giant intelligent arachnoid aliens take over the earth, laying waste all before them. Perhaps that's just me.
 
Maviself said:
Miley Cyrus *shudder*

No, but seriously Bach's Toccata & Fugue (in d minor or indeedy any key!)
Due entirely to a very creepy waxwork in Brading waxwork museum on the Isle of Wight. It portrayed a woman laying in bed dying of consumption with her chest rising and falling and the music playing really loudly!!
I was only about 8 years old, left me with a lifelong hatred of waxworks and THAT piece of music.
Thanks parents! :shock:

You might be happy to know that the Brading Museum still has those exhibits ... and the music.

Actually, Jeff Wayne's War of the Worlds album supplies a piece that gives me the shivers. The Red Weed instrumental section, to me, really gives the feeling of being alone, desolate and sad.

I still like the album, though.
 
Ultravox - Vienna

It's a haunting song anyway, but when i was about 12 one of my class died of leukemia as this was his favourite song, they played it at his funeral.
Everytime i listen to this song now it brings back memories of this funeral.
I recently got a 80's CD with Vienna on. i had to skip the track.
 
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