Music for Halloween

Ah, October 31st, the night of the year when the ghosts and goblins come out from their seclusion and freely roam the streets, extorting candy from weary homeowners. Nothing scarier than that!

Anyway, as part of my attempt to get into the spirit of the holiday, I was thinking of discussing some of my favorite scary movies. That having been done several million times by now, I'm taking a road slightly less traveled:

Music for Halloween to Creep You Out and So Forth

(As chosen by a jaded hipster doofus for other jaded hipster doofi, which means no Iron Maiden)

Liars - They Were Wrong So We Drowned - This one's an obvious choice. It's a concept album about witches, for Christ's sake, but it's not one that features lots of harmonizing metal guitars and such, instead propelled by feedback and noise, and sloppy pounding drums.

Scott Walker - The Drift - This one puts Liars to shame in terms of how unsettling it is. It's insane to me that this guy used to make big gushy pop songs, while he now makes creepy avant-garde soundscapes with about as much connection to the concept of "pop music" as Enya does to the world of heavy metal. The Drift is actually unlistenably weird if I have it on by myself in the dark. Especially gut-wrenching: the part in "Jesse" where all the atonal strings suddenly drop out of the mix and Scott is left alone wailing "I'm the only one left alive!" for half a minute.

Bela Bartok - "Music for Strings, Percussion, and Celeste" - You know all those parts of The Shining where Jack Torrance is creeping around with that crazy gleam in his eye in that "calm before the storm" way, and there's that slim, vaguely atonal music that fits so perfectly with the mood that you barely notice it's there until it jumps out at you? That's the third movement of this.

Godspeed You Black Emperor! - f#a#oo - "We're trapped in the belly of this horrible machine, and the machine is bleeding to death."

Bobby "Boris" Pickett and the Crypt-Kickers - "Monster Mash" - Zombies, the Wolfman, Dracula (and his son), and Frankenstein all in one place?! In 1962, terror reached heights previously experienced only by Abbot and Costello!

And with this idea having reached its "hilarious" novelty entry, it's clear I'm out of ideas, although I did have a pretty easy target that I passed up, being that Kevin Federline's album was released today. Michael Jackson's "Thriller" is not included because I get tired of that song overshadowing the eight better songs on the album of the same name (even though it's almost ridiculous to think of "Billie Jean," "Beat It," and "P.Y.T." as being overshadowed by anything in the world of pop music).