Tip jar

If you like CaB and wish to support it, you can use PayPal or KoFi. Thank you, and I hope you continue to enjoy the site - Neil.

Buy Me a Coffee at ko-fi.com

Support CaB

Recent

Welcome to Cook'd and Bomb'd. Please login or sign up.

March 28, 2024, 08:10:56 PM

Login with username, password and session length

Eerie songs that create an unexplainable feeling

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

Previous topic - Next topic

chveik



Twed

Quote from: Fisher Goes Berserk on July 19, 2018, 10:46:25 AM
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R5prT2qiiWY

Also, the video is horrible.
There's something about his register that seems demonic. A weird little chimp demon from a hell that has the beige TV-am colour scheme.

manticore

Every record I've ever heard that uses auto-tune on the vocals chills me slightly in a way I find hard to put into words.

gloria

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


darby o chill

Quote from: holyzombiejesus on July 20, 2018, 12:29:46 PM
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.

That is great.

From the same era, Listening Wind and to a lesser extent, Flowers of Romance were similarly exciting/puzzling/creepy to me.

Quote from: Phoenix Lazarus on July 23, 2018, 08:38:40 PM
I remember a song I heard, about twenty-five years ago, on something like the Janice Long or Annie Nightingale show on Radio One, which consisted solely of someone, a male vocalist, going, "Hey Dad, I'm dead, Dad.  You hear me?  I'm dead, Dad, you see?  I'm dead," in an American accent, over an increasingly urgent musical background. Anyone else know that one?

You're not thinking of the fantastic 'Hello Dad... I'm In Jail' by Was (Not Was), are you?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=biHJ6S91xBY

Absolutely creased up the first time I heard that.

jobotic

Quote from: Nice Relaxing Poo on July 24, 2018, 10:25:34 PM
Mogwai- Tracy

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p3uIwEY27DQ

I remember listening to this on a long quiet car drive in the middle of the night 20 years ago thinking that music couldn't get more atmospheric and melancholy than this. Yes it could but at the time it would do.

Mogwai's best moment for me. Don't find it eerie though. Love how it reminds me of Talking Heads' Found A Job even though it's nothing like it.

jobotic

I Won't Hurt You by The West Coast Pop Art Experimental Band is lovely but it's easy to picture him singing it to someone who is tied up in a basement.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qju3FEcKTrw


manticore

I don't have a great knowledge of the Butthole Surfers' work but some of it was definitely freaky. '22 Going on 23' sticks in my mind as an example, as well as being utterly obnoxious in the way it treats the radio samples, despite the ecstatic guitar.

I suppose they were out to recreate the experience of a bad trip that wasn't all bad in retrospect.

Has anyone mentioned the glaringly obvious choice Bright Eyes? Although the unexplainable feeling is just sadness associated with Watership Down I suppose. Hard to believe the same guy who made Remember you're a Womble wrote it.

poodlefaker

"Polly Vaughan" by Anne Briggs.

I love her unaccompanied singing, but when I heard this the first few lines made me laugh out loud - it sounded ridiculous, like a parody of a folk song. As it went on I became more and more gripped and disturbed, by the end I was terrified. Always a deeply moving experience.

Quote from: Beep Cleep Chimney on July 25, 2018, 08:58:59 PM


You're not thinking of the fantastic 'Hello Dad... I'm In Jail' by Was (Not Was), are you?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=biHJ6S91xBY

Absolutely creased up the first time I heard that.

I was just about to post that.

On listening again he really emphasizes he's in jail - it's pretty hard to miss.

Epic Bisto

Quote from: jobotic on July 25, 2018, 09:39:09 PM
I Won't Hurt You by The West Coast Pop Art Experimental Band is lovely but it's easy to picture him singing it to someone who is tied up in a basement.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qju3FEcKTrw

That's not too hard to imagine since Bob Markley was a thoroughly vile human being.

Dead Soon

Quote from: manticore on July 25, 2018, 02:41:32 PM
Every record I've ever heard that uses auto-tune on the vocals chills me slightly in a way I find hard to put into words.

Because despite the contemporaneous application of the device, we all know how horribly, horribly dated it's going to sound, and it already sounds like unrefined shite. The earlier stuff has already been sun crisped.

jobotic

Quote from: Epic Bisto on July 26, 2018, 09:55:50 PM
That's not too hard to imagine since Bob Markley was a thoroughly vile human being.

So I've read. Is it him singing?

Epic Bisto

Probably not. He was too busy in an adjacent booth writing more songs about 10 year olds.

Enzo

Quote from: TheMonk on July 19, 2018, 12:37:08 PM
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

I never thought I'd see Blakey from On the buses, Chris Langham, Ryan Gosling, and Jacob Rees-Mogg in the same music video. But here we are.


Chairman Bodog

Mountain Goats - Pure Love https://youtu.be/-R34JsEMlgo

It has a self-consciously hamartophobic vibe thrashing all sorts of nerves, ending.

https://youtu.be/4kGo1N6IEh4 Captures perfectly the illustration of extraterrestrial conflict.

https://youtu.be/9YqKcu7Gm-Q I used to reloop this in bed on drone. The perfect creep to a comedown and still floating.

https://youtu.be/0OW1h9zZZUc NDE through and through. I feel bugs crawling when I blast this.

manticore


purlieu

Quote from: Clownbaby on July 19, 2018, 01:56:36 PM
There's something about Crescendolls by Daft Punk I find a bit.. threatening

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=quHVq28Y_gg

Nobody ever knows what I mean though. I think it's the endless manic repetition and the "weeeeyyyyyyyyyyyyyy!" It's like the musical equivalent of being stuck on a fairground ride, and you don't feel like you're secured in the seat properly, and everyone else is enjoying it but you
Completely with you on this. There are some slightly odd intervals between the notes that just make that melody really unsettling, and the repeated crowd is nightmarish.

Quote from: Darles Chickens on July 20, 2018, 12:27:51 PM
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.
Always makes me jump, no matter how often I listen to it. The opener, 'Myrrhman', is a very odd, almost unsettling track.


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.

On a very different note, theme from Follyfoot, 'The Lightning Tree' by The Settlers, is one of those weirdly hypnotic songs that ends up really eerie through its use of wordless backing vocals and repetition. Somehow manages to get creepier by briefly going into a major key https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8vDZHANTXW8

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

Shaky

Been listening to Bunkerpop by Lonelady again and almost anything off the album could qualify. Really nails that slightly queasy, familiar yet wandering-in-the-stark-unknown post-punk, brutalist vibe.

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

The first odd change at 1.14 is really unsettling.


Hymenoptera

Lions Writing the Bible: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ha7ZSkCDo38

I can hear it in that Blue Jam/Jam sketch and be fine with it, but on its own it realy gets into my spine. Do not like.

On a different note, My Brother's Wife by the Butthole Surfers used to make me uncomfortable, but I really love it now. "I really muuust... be awff..." https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eCYwdXLC4_8

Ice Castles by Ween sometimes catches me off guard. Depends on my mood whether its eerie or easy listening: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EuXYZi-rZT0

Phil_A

Quote from: gloria on July 25, 2018, 03:11:37 PM
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

The first recordings as Mr & Mrs Smith and Mr Drake have that uncanny quality in spades. It's like it exists musically somewhere between Smallfilms and the Wicker Man, the gentle acoustic sounds of 1970s children's TV mixed with the unsettling quality of old folks songs.

The clarinet instrumental part in Camouflage still gives me a shiver.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SxMhatn2n7E

It's the kind of album where I would love to know the thinking behind and what the inspiration was but no-one involved has ever really talked about it. It's always had a feeling of oblique mystery that has never faded with time. The fact that none of the other Sea Nymphs recordings occupy the same kind of shadowy space only adds to the mystique.

Sean Ymphs

Agreed on Mr & Mrs Smith & Mr Drake. Most of the Tim Smith-adjacent stuff I associate more with a euphoric/transcendental quality than the melancholy/creepy feeling I associate with the other songs in this thread, though it certainly gets there at times.

Secret from the Hazel EP is one:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BS0hDllluBI

A lot of William D. Drake's first album has this quality too:

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

a duncandisorderly

Quote from: gloria on July 25, 2018, 03:11:37 PM
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

I can't bear cardiacs, but I loved the sea-nymphs. weird, isn't it? I saw cardiacs about five times one year, at the behest of an obsessed mate, & one of the gigs (garage, packed beyond what was legal, it felt like) they had problems with a rented multitrack tape-deck & abandoned the show. I cornered smith about this a few days later at another gig (not his) while he was poncing a quid off me to finish paying for his round. I said "there were five or six of you on stage- why couldn't you do a show without the backing tapes?" & he said something like "the arrangements, dear boy, the arrangements...".
I always thought he'd be happier producing west-end musicals really, but the nymphs stuff was lovely.

a duncandisorderly

Quote from: Nice Relaxing Poo on July 26, 2018, 08:18:55 AM
Has anyone mentioned the glaringly obvious choice Bright Eyes? Although the unexplainable feeling is just sadness associated with Watership Down I suppose. Hard to believe the same guy who made Remember you're a Womble wrote it.

mike batt's current collaboration is- shudder!- with hawkwind. ffs, how'd that happen?

Clownbaby

I hate that Wombles/Wizzard crossover song.

"Well I wish it could be a Wombling merry Christmas/...every daayyyyyy"

Why the fuck didn't they just omit the "every day" bit? They just awkwardly tack it on even though the addition of  "wombling" filled the syllables that made up the origin melody. Really fucking gets to me. Fucking Wombles.