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Eerie songs that create an unexplainable feeling

Started by Clownbaby, July 19, 2018, 10:37:39 AM

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alan nagsworth

John Maus is quite good at this, for me. In particular, Castles In The Grave hits a nerve in me like nothing else he's ever done. Given that Maus has a brain that goes a mile a minute, yet his songs are always so abrupt in lyrical content, and this one is just the title barked out over and over, and a chorus that's just John howling into the abyss, I find it utterly compelling. What does it mean? What does anything mean???

Most bewildering to me though is that piercing synth bit that comes in three times during the song. Every time I hear it I feel like throwing my hands to the sky and asking what the fucking point of anything is in the world. It absolutely tears the top of my head off and McFlurries my brain to oblivion. A couple of months ago I listened to it over twenty times in a day and I still wasn't sick of it. It's a work of mental genius.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t2Cmm_G3kss


PaulTMA


Sean Ymphs

Quote from: Clownbaby on July 19, 2018, 04:58:20 PM
Goldfrapp - Lovely Head

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=ITi6uat0BuQ

Is it a synth or human wailing? Or both? This whole album really.

I believe it is a Korg MS-20, which can take an external signal (like a voice, in this case) to control the pitch. Here's a video of someone trying to do this:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2H0uInZ09H0&t=235


This song has a very melancholy feel to it - Clouds Across the Moon by the RAH band

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V4R97AeM6IE

Fisher Goes Berserk


Fisher Goes Berserk

Quote from: Fisher Goes Berserk on July 19, 2018, 08:21:53 PM
Oh, the HTV jingle is *beautiful*. It reminds me for some reason of story cassettes I had as a child, maybe by Disney. Similar synth sound or something, I'm not sure.

I've worked out what it was: it was the jingle for Rainbow cassettes.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eibNDwKPH10

*idiosyncratic wipe*



Enzo


chveik


Clownbaby

Quote from: Sean Ymphs on July 19, 2018, 09:35:02 PM
I believe it is a Korg MS-20, which can take an external signal (like a voice, in this case) to control the pitch. Here's a video of someone trying to do this:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2H0uInZ09H0&t=235


This song has a very melancholy feel to it - Clouds Across the Moon by the RAH band

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V4R97AeM6IE

Ohhh, I see

popcorn

Quote from: Clownbaby on July 19, 2018, 04:58:20 PM
Goldfrapp - Lovely Head

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=ITi6uat0BuQ

Is it a synth or human wailing? Or both? This whole album really.

Quote from: Sean Ymphs on July 19, 2018, 09:35:02 PM
I believe it is a Korg MS-20, which can take an external signal (like a voice, in this case) to control the pitch. Here's a video of someone trying to do this:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2H0uInZ09H0&t=235

I wonder if that's really true? Watching live videos of the song, it's definitely some interaction between an MS-20 synth and Alison Goldfrapp's voice, but I'm skeptical that the MS-20 could generate such a precise pitch from a vocal input (see the horrendous result of the experiment linked by Sean Ymphs). Maybe it's just being run through the MS-20 filters?

God, Goldfrapp used to be good.

Clownbaby

Quote from: popcorn on July 20, 2018, 12:09:11 PM
I wonder if that's really true? Watching live videos of the song, it's definitely some interaction between an MS-20 synth and Alison Goldfrapp's voice, but I'm skeptical that the MS-20 could generate such a precise pitch from a vocal input (see the horrendous result of the experiment linked by Sean Ymphs). Maybe it's just being run through the MS-20 filters?

God, Goldfrapp used to be good.

Yeah, there's a few strange voice moments in the album where it's almost uncanny valley cause you can't tell where her voice ends and an effect begins

Deer Stop

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=XMsxa3qk2bA

Felt Mountain

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=X-qov7Ctmkc

It's such a gorgeously strange album. I don't think she's done something quite as good since, even though I do like a lot of her other songs. The only problem i sometimes have is that she really underpronounces words so half the time i dont know what the fuck she's on about even if I like what I'm hearing. A funny one, Goldfrapp. There's a complete split in musical styles and they never come together on one album. She does the strange wicker man folk/foggy mountains sounding albums, and then on the other side you've got the electronic sexy strip club T Rex sounding albums. She's a bit of a split personality artist.




Talk Talk - Taphead
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=piG59eSi6DY

From "Laughing Stock", usually agreed to be their most 'difficult' album.  I didn't like this album at all when I first heard it, but its curious meditative atmosphere grew on me.  It's worth persevering with its slow buildup and weird dissonance to appreciate the sudden release of tension around 6:00.

holyzombiejesus

When I was younger (1980 presumably), I was in the back of my dad's car and we stopped at a red light just outside Woolworths on the hill up in to Newcastle (Under-Lyme). I was reading a book about Werewolves and had just got to this little picture story about a boy who met a man in the woods late at night. The man gave the boy a jar of ointment and told him to rub it all over his body by the light of the next full moon, The boy did this and then became a werewolf. Whilst I was reading this, Peter Gabriel's Games Without Frontiers was on the radio and whenever I hear it now I still get this weird combination of excitement and fear; a (maybe sexual) frisson.

Elvis singing Blue Moon is a bit of a rum 'un too.


Clownbaby

Beach House - Wishes

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=OS6duOoxctw

I'm not really arsed about their other songs but I live the strange we stoning feeling this song gives me. It's like some kind of emotionally broken national anthem, the video is great with it as well and when I listen to the song, it still weirdly feels like it's the really intense dad from Twin Peaks emotionally singing it




Fisher Goes Berserk

Quote from: popcorn on July 20, 2018, 12:09:11 PM
God, Goldfrapp used to be good.

I love Felt Mountain so much. Pilots is another MS-20-sounding song and so gorgeous.

I went off them when every song started sounding like 'Spirit in the Sky'. I mean, I love that song too, but come on.

Clownbaby

Quote from: Fisher Goes Berserk on July 20, 2018, 02:23:50 PM
I love Felt Mountain so much. Pilots is another MS-20-sounding song and so gorgeous.

I went off them when every song started sounding like 'Spirit in the Sky'. I mean, I love that song too, but come on.

Head First and Seventh tree were kind of damp squibs to be. And Silver Eye wasn't that much to write home about. Kind of irrelevant but she really doesn't suit that orange hair.

Depressed Beyond Tables

Quote from: Enzo on July 20, 2018, 12:14:05 AM
BBC VHS idents had a knack of feeling quite eerie, probably because they are in minor keys.

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

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wK8jf_93Lv8

https://youtu.be/DQK3XiL44vU?t=54s

Well the first and last are in major keys but there are minor chords involved so point taken. Anyway a major 7th chord can sometimes sound sad in certain contexts too.

1st one is a minor II/V/I, resolving to a major key.

2nd one is similar (II/V/VImin) where instead of resolving to the tonic (I) it goes to the relative minor (VI).

3rd resolves to major.




Sean Ymphs

Prole Art Threat by the Fall brings out this feeling in me. Something about the way it's mixed.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R8yJnIF4nb4

Shrivel Up by DEVO too

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T4oVOFVhV_A

Clownbaby

I love that first album by DEVO. I kind of wish more of their music after that has the same kind of feeling. Basically anything off Hardcore DEVO could go in here

Chango

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=LtQ2iYoeCcs


Cuntbeaks

The mighty Laibach ramping up the psychological pressure with the 'serial killer theme tune', Vade Retro.

https://youtu.be/xi7HbFfu5To

I.D. Smith

You're Not Alone by Olive https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s4oZdUV-G-Y

I think it's the line "wait till the end of time" - makes me think of inexplicably hearing this song whilst in a spacesuit, alone, hurtling through a wormhole, 10 Trillion Light Years away from home.

Also it came out whilst I was in my teens and made me think of being alone and down in a dance club before I'd had the experience of being alone and down in a dance club.

non capisco

Quote from: I.D. Smith on July 20, 2018, 11:43:00 PM
You're Not Alone by Olive

Yeah, 'You're Not Alone' by Olive and 'The Box' by Orbital are the two most deflating late 90s dance hits.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P5_G8exuIRc

^ The video for The Box is aesthetically excellent but it came out at a time when I was at university and was trying to rebuild my personality from the ground up and forget all about the howling raw horror of my adolescence, where the only cure for looking like a pustulating burns victim was to go on a trial course for a new acne medicine which sends you absolutely fucking hatstand and makes you think ducks are chatting amongst themselves and calling you a cunt. The Box and its accompanying video with that alien lass trudging about seemed like the soundtrack of a predetermined mire that I was fated never to escape. I've just watched it again and I thought it was emotionally effective but not as overarchingly depressing as I remembered so hey, there's progress I suppose.

Avril Lavigne

Quote from: non capisco on July 21, 2018, 12:09:01 AM
Yeah, 'You're Not Alone' by Olive and 'The Box' by Orbital are the two most deflating late 90s dance hits.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P5_G8exuIRc

^ The video for The Box is aesthetically excellent but it came out at a time when I was at university and was trying to rebuild my personality from the ground up and forget all about the howling raw horror of my adolescence, where the only cure for looking like a pustulating burns victim was to go on a trial course for a new acne medicine which sends you absolutely fucking hatstand and makes you think ducks are chatting amongst themselves and calling you a cunt. The Box and its accompanying video with that alien lass trudging about seemed like the soundtrack of a predetermined mire that I was fated never to escape. I've just watched it again and I thought it was emotionally effective but not as overarchingly depressing as I remembered so hey, there's progress I suppose.

I've never seen this before, & can confirm it's horrible.

non capisco

#56
Quote from: Avril Lavigne on July 21, 2018, 12:14:59 AM
I've never seen this before, & can confirm it's horrible.

She does walk right past that 24 hour bagel place on Brick Lane when there's virtually no queue, the stupid alien idiot. Get one with mustard and gherkins down yer, and an apple slice!

In hindsight I think it's a banging promo video, completely at odds with the high on the hog whoo-hoo things can only get better vibe of 1997 and one that fucked me right up when I first saw it, the utterly overwhelming melancholy of the thing. I'd still put that on my CV if I were Tilda Swinton.

Chriddof

Martin Kippenberger - Bang, Bang (My Baby Shot Me Down)

Cover version of the song made famous by Cher. Kippenberger was a 1980s German sculptor and conceptual artist who died in 1997. There's something really haunted about this that surpasses the occasionally quirky English phrasing, the awkward gender flips and the flat singing. It's the synths, mainly, particularly the ending with that fade out on a sustained chord - for me it's real shivers-down-the-spine eerieness. For some reason it reminds me really strongly of this one classroom in my middle school circa 1988 (not too long after this was recorded, if I've got the date right), and also the closing credits of the baffling ITV-broadcast French cartoon Wattoo Wattoo Superbird.

#58
Quote from: studpuppet on July 19, 2018, 01:43:07 PM
The theme from Picture Box always made the classroom feel a bit darker.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3o_NTPtW8NU

Yes, I remember the same at my school

Top comment "with hindsight it sounds like a paedophiles ice cream van"