Eerie songs that create an unexplainable feeling

[manticore]

Aphex is known for being a bit creepy at times, but there are three particular pieces on Selected Ambient Works Vol II that I found unnerving to the point of being uncomfortable to listen to at first:
Curtains https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CM_8Mf73Yh4
Windowsill: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O5Zsn6tJ2MY
Grass: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PZgtQ-pGUQ4
A lot of the album is pretty sinister, but these three tracks seemed to unleash a real sense of primal fear in me.

I can't listen to that Aphex Twin stuff, despite its obvious brilliance. It has a cold, inhuman quality that I can't suffer. The same for this:

That said, there's one piece of music that still puts the fear of God into me, which is Stravinsky's Rite of Spring. Specifically the opening to the second movement. Never before or since has dissonance sounded so utterly inhuman and evil, and the repeated descending melody is abhorrent. It makes me shudder every time I hear it. Brings to mind a Lovecraftian image of discovering that nothing in the world is quite what it seems and that everything is fundamentally wrong.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9aJITLFLM30

When I heard The Rite of Spring I thought it was obviously brilliant but also as you say quite inhuman and when I read about the ballet and the way it portrays the sacrifice of a young girl who dances herself to death without any care for her fate I wasn't surprised at all.

[nero]

Stevie Wonder - I Just Called To Say I Love You

I find it hard to put into words how distressing I find this song.

Completely agree. Until a few weeks ago I genuinely thought it was about the apocalypse. I have no idea why I thought he was singing about the apocalypse.

"No News Years day..."

I am hoping to use the Residents 'Gingerbread Man' in a short film I have written. Creepy shit.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hr-I6-gxecg

I also find the opening to 'Good Vibrations' to be a bit dark for some reason.

[non capisco]

It's not an eerie song in any way, shape or form but on more than one occasion while listening to 'Slow Life' by Super Furry Animals I've wanted to burst into cathartic tears when the first chorus kicks in and I really can't pinpoint why. So an unexplainable feeling then I guess. Gruff is a melodic alchemist.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xn6n0Cak3fE

Rocks are slow life, rocks are slow li-i-ife.

And then you get the strings at the end. Wonderful song.

EDIT: That video's quite strobey so do avoid if that's a problem.

[jobotic]

The caretaker is an obvious choice, but there we are.

Here are the Sebald albums. Him at his best I think. The super deep voices that suddenly stop are wonderfully eerie.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C5PFGj9Z0cg

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E0Spn8l4o4k

[Absorb the anus burn]

Godley and Creme: I Pity Inanimate Objects

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q_-YiM2vZuo

[Jumblegraws]

Silver by the Pixies makes me feel carsick. Like, not just nauseated, but the specific sensation of carsickness. I wonder if Principal Skinner played it in his office.

I saw Devo being discussed when I was skimming this thread, didn't catch if it was mentioned but this performance of Tunnel of Life shits me up https://youtu.be/vbEUhtZVBNY

[Clownbaby]

Silver by the Pixies makes me feel carsick. Like, not just nauseated, but the specific sensation of carsickness. I wonder if Principal Skinner played it in his office.

I saw Devo being discussed when I was skimming this thread, didn't catch if it was mentioned but this performance of Tunnel of Life shits me up https://youtu.be/vbEUhtZVBNY

It's Bailey's Walk by The Pixies that gets me.

God I love Devo. Eeriness in their bones.

[Neomod]

I dunno if anyone has mentioned cockney romany David Essex. When I was 8 I bought the Gonna Make You a Star single. Loved that song.

Then I turned it over.

David Essex Window https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fspz4PTEpy0

sample lyric <child's voice>
"Mummy, Mummy. I'm scared". (screams)

Oh and the ennui and despair of knowing it's school in the morning when I heard this.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fspz4PTEpy0

[hedgehog90]

This track from the latest Sea Nymphs album is one of the most eerie, beautiful things ever. Totally ghosty. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JDLwSGuiNGQ

Also, from The Sea Nymphs first album, Sarah on a Worm.
So woozy and dream-like. Makes me imagine a sort of wibbly wobbly dreamscape full of, well, flying worms...

Also, Cymbal Rush by Thom Yorke, with headphones (important).
It's my go to song when I'm feeling terribly depressed. It doesn't make me feel any better in the long-term, but for the duration that it's playing it just sort of aligns those depressive brain signals into something else, like arranging a mess of iron filings with a magnet into recognizable shapes.
It might just be the stereo shift trick at the beginning - the strange vibrating tone that goes from left to right - it focuses all my attention on the song, like repeating a mantra before meditation.

[Sgt. Duckie]

Beck's Mutations is one of my favourite albums, and its closing track  - Runner's Dial Zero - is one of his most eerie escapades lyrically and musically. I believe the American version of the album just ends with Static, Diamond Bollocks is hidden..and no Runner's on it.


https://youtu.be/ros8KQyWArc

[flotemysost]

The start of Because by the Beatles, and the chorus of the Fugees' version of Killing Me Softly (well, that was the only version I knew) both used to make me cry without fail as a young child.

The Beatles were on fairly heavy rotation in our household, and TOTP was standard teatime viewing around the time the Fugees hit was in the charts, so I'd always dread when either was about to come on and find some excuse to leave the room. Something about that progression of notes shared by both songs (which I'm sure someone who actually plays/understands music can name) really got to me I guess.

[Enzo]

This got to number one in Australia.
It's like aliens have been shown pop music and tried to create their own version.
https://youtu.be/1-8xMWA6_ZE

The b-side was surprisingly decent though

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dzUw7q2MXqo

[Clownbaby]

The underrated queen of uncomfortable music: Naomi Elizabeth

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=fqBW9Ll3QVA

[Drop Dead Fred]

Gary Numan's 'Are Friends Electric?' That one has always creeped me out.

'Summer' by Bobby Goldsboro.

'Ode to Billy Joe' by Bobbie Gentry.

Possibly due to the string arrangements in the above 2 songs.

[Galeee]

An old song, the Laughing Policeman, frequently played on children's radio shows. Hideous, sinister forced laughter, used to make me shudder.

[Phoenix Lazarus]

An old song, the Laughing Policeman, frequently played on children's radio shows. Hideous, sinister forced laughter, used to make me shudder.

Does anyone else remember laugh boxes; little plastic boxes with a small loudspeaker built inside, and a recorded laugh that played the sound of tinny laughter if you pulled a string?  I remember seeing and hearing one used in the 70s.  I found that quite creepy.

[Phoenix Lazarus]

Visage, Mind of a Toy, was wonderfully sinister and creepy.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yUKzxqDbNjQ

[Fisher Goes Berserk]

Bumping this thread because I heard this song earlier and remembered how weird it makes me feel, especially around the 1:30 mark.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gR1SvcFMWBg

Unexpected chord, synth strings, chorusy backing vocals. It only happens once in the song, which I think heightens the creepiness.

[spaghetamine]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XXR7Dg6IzyU

ariel pink's haunted graffiti - the ballad of bobby pyn

I find it really difficult to articulate how this tune makes me feel but it used to be a staple of all my stoned nocturnal bike rides around southampton

[Phil_A]

Beck's Mutations is one of my favourite albums, and its closing track  - Runner's Dial Zero - is one of his most eerie escapades lyrically and musically. I believe the American version of the album just ends with Static, Diamond Bollocks is hidden..and no Runner's on it.


https://youtu.be/ros8KQyWArc

Similar vibe to Big Star's "Holocaust", another song that has an inexplicable, haunting power to it.

[Dirty Boy]

Not Waving by This Heat. Eeriest sounding thing on an album of eerie songs.

Lazily quoting one of the comments:

so detached and despairing. a fucking nightmare if I'm honest but strangely beautiful too

---

What happened to Clownbaby anyway? She was a good poster of things.

[Sin Agog]

Was listening to Lisa Germano's Geek the Girl for the first time in donkey's yesterday, and that track with the real 911 call is genuinely harrowing, and maybe even a little distasteful, I'm not sure.  https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=SI5h59uyiUI

[Glebe]

The Doors' 'Wishful Sinful' features some eerie wind instrumentation... in a sort of similar vein there's Cathedral's 'Reaching Happiness, Touching Pain' and it's supremely creepy, sad fluteness.

Jane's Addiction's 'Then She Did...' features a bit of an odd break... according to guitarist Dave Navarro, "On the breakdown of 'Then She Did...' I improvised with my echo set on infinite repeats. You get this eerie feeling, but you can't really hear it. It's very quiet—I wanted you to feel uncomfortable and not know why."

On a trad song tip, Irish folk song 'Weila Waile' is a cheery little ditty about infanticide... The Dubliner's version is one of the most famous... Lisa Hannigan recorded a version that featured on the soundtrack to Irish horror film The Hole in the Ground.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R5prT2qiiWY

Also, the video is horrible.

The lyrics and some of the vocalizations are a bit naff, but I have to admit, I actually love that song. Learnt to play it on guitar and all. Also, I don't recall seeing the video during childhood, but there's something nostalgic about the locations in it. Ph.D. keyboardist Tony Hymas composed the theme tune to the original Mr. Men series, oddly enough.

World In Action end theme

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=95qLDc7zwYY

Ah yes, that old chestnut, cast a gloom over my childhood too with it's dreary dirgeness, like John Paul Jones having a mental breakdown during an extended solo.

Actually, if we're doing TV themes then Dramarama calls for the obligatory mention... and of course Chocky, which is also rather sad and mournful.

Eerie logo tunes

Video logos also proved unsettling, and doubly so with horror films and the like where the anticipatory sense of dread and anxiety was already there:

Vestron Video logo.

Orion Video logo.

And so forth.

Stevie Wonder - I Just Called To Say I Love You

I find it hard to put into words how distressing I find this song.

Yeah, there's an odd detached feeling about it and it felt like an odd 'pop' song, even as a kid.

Silver by the Pixies makes me feel carsick. Like, not just nauseated, but the specific sensation of carsickness. I wonder if Principal Skinner played it in his office.

It's a beautiful tune but I think I understand what you mean. I guess the guitar slide bit only adds to the uneasiness.

It's Bailey's Walk by The Pixies that gets me.

One of my fave Pixies B-sides. Saw them do it live and all.

Beck's Mutations is one of my favourite albums, and its closing track  - Runner's Dial Zero - is one of his most eerie escapades lyrically and musically. I believe the American version of the album just ends with Static, Diamond Bollocks is hidden..and no Runner's on it.

https://youtu.be/ros8KQyWArc

Yeah, that's a great sad, eerie tune. Mutations is one of my fave Beck albums actually, some fantastic songwriting on display.

The start of Because by the Beatles

'Moonlight Sonata' backwards, innit? I recall Ian McDonald suggesting in Revolution in the Head that the song's feeling of icy detachment may have been a result of Lennon's heroin use at the time. Actually, speaking of Beatles eeriness, McDonald points out George's unearthly wail at the end of his beautiful 'Long Long Long'... he also opined that the "skeletal" closing Gm7 is one of the most "resonant" in The Beatles catalogue, it's certainly a lovely, emotive chord.

[JesusAndYourBush]

Airport by The Motors fills me with a strange melancholy that I can't explain.  It's probably that eerie keyboard.

[Bently Sheds]

Not an eerie song, but Cathy's Clown by the Everley Brothers scared the crap out of me when I was a wee tiny and that fright still resonates with me as an adult.

There was some synaesthetic shit going on in my infant mind where the music regularly caused me to hallucinate some great mechanical procession of malevolence slowly parading towards me, specifically over a raised level crossing. The initial robotic mannequins crossed the railway line and blocked the view of the central figure and source of all my ill feelings which slowly, via the course of the song, revealed itself to be a huge, terrifying papier machë clown head which rotated back and forth in time to the lumpen beat of the song. I'm stuck in the back seat of a car, my parents up front happily bellowing along with the song. As the giant head comes alongside our car, it rotates and faces me and it sees me. Brrr...

P.S. I am not a mentaller.

[Shaky]

Another G Numan - I nominate Jo the Waiter, the tale of a gay love affair gone awry against the background of a decaying world. The chord changes and sparseness of the lyrics and instrumentation have always given me chills:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wwlzLNY6l8k

[Drop Dead Fred]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G1vBeDuh1dU

[Fisher Goes Berserk]

Stina Nordenstam - Murder in Mairyland Park

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QjdqVAoLzRk

[ndrwkrtn]

Renaldo & The Loaf - Here's to the Oblong Boys. Everything about it is queasy.

[Glebe]

Ennio Morricone - Eternity.