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Mm. "Scary" covers a broad range of emotion, from the enjoyable tingle of a horror movie to utter pants-shitting terror, and it shades into sadness or anger at either end. A ranting madman can be scary—but so can a whisper in a quiet house. Almost all effective music has a certain spooky quality (it's no accident we speak of a catchy melody as being "haunting"), but self-consciously "scary" music is hard to pull off without turning into wretched self-parody (see the oeuvre of Brian "I'm the Devil! BOOGA BOOGA BOOGA!" Warner, of the popular beat combo Marilyn Manson).
That said, there is some music I find genuinely unsettling. And, as with Flux's kickoff, it tends to be the quieter stuff. Some of it depends on foreknowledge of the performer's mental state at the time of making—Syd Barrett's post-Floyd recordings, or Skip Spence's Oar. They just creep me out. Daniel Johnston, too; even though his tunes generally have a surface ebullience (and the indie-rock community seems to regard him as a Holy Fool, although I suspect many of them are secretly laughing at him rather than with him), all I can hear is the damage.
Malcolm Mooney sounds like he's having a nervous breakdown on mic during the twenty brutally-repetitive minutes of Can's "Yoo Doo Right"—and indeed, he was hospitalized and left the band shortly afterwards.
Nick Drake's Pink Moon album, in its 28-minute entirety—recorded so intimately that it sounds like he's right behind you, singing as if he doesn't want to be overheard, in a voice so enervated and hopeless—it sounds like a suicide note. And maybe it was.
John Cale has made a career out of menace. When he tries the hardest, he fails the most spectacularly—his ghoulish take on "Heartbreak Hotel" was so far over the top that it crossed out of horror-movie territory and into Rocky Horror Picture Show country, camper than a row of tents—but with the Music For A New Society record he really hit the mark. In an interview some years back, Cale confirmed what I'd long suspected: that the songs on New Society had been recorded with rhythm guitar or piano parts to give them structure, and that those parts were subsequently erased—leaving melodies, percussion, and flourishes floating unanchored. It's disorienting: there's nothing for the listener to latch on to, and Cale's voice, in the sparse instrumentation, is uncomfortably naked. It's almost unbearably tense—particularly the spoken-word "Santies" and "If You Were Still Around," where Cale is singing out of his range, groping for notes, trying to find the melody even as he sings it. It's harrowing.
More later. |
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