Imagine, if you dare, that it’s the eve of Halloween, and—gasp!—your playlist isn’t finished yet.
Here are some more suggestions for resolving the plot, with a few good twists:
“Creeper’s Tale” (from Jeeper’s Creepers)
by Bennett Salvay, Victor Salva | Spotify | Youtube
“Creeper” is right. Gracefully menacing violins hang like the blade of a guillotine. A barely-there gong breathes on the back of your neck. A bassoon steps down into a basement we all know it shouldn’t. It’s very, very creepy, and, as an opener or an interlude, it plays well with a creepy playlist.
“Angel”
by Massive Attack | Spotify | Youtube
Sinister subterranean bass is the spine of this hypnotic slow burn, which waits more than a minute for an ethereal voice to appear. “You are my angel,” it flatters, but the bass keeps telling you to keep your guard up. Guitars, drums and digital effects slither and dart all around, swelling into instrumental choruses that work equally well on a couch or coupled up on a dance floor.
“A Forest” (a cover of The Cure)
by Clan of Xymox | Spotify | Youtube
I like this version better than The Cure’s original. Coming three decades later from a fellow pioneer of the darkwave genre, the production is sparse by modern standards but a breath of fresh air in context, locking after an atmospheric start into a simple but satisfying sequence of gothy new-wave tropes at an energetic tempo.
“Wushu Dolls” (from Cyberpunk 2077)
by Marcin Przybytowicz | Spotify | Youtube
This song was written to adaptively loop during open-ended combat scenarios in a video game, which explains the lack of finish to the ending. But the main riff and groove are killer while they last. Guttural guitar and down-in-the-gutter drums with delicious trashy hi hat accents just a hair behind the beat are soon made even better by an epic, even shorter-lived top line that makes perfect Halloween sense.
“Queen Mab”
by Becca Stevens | Spotify | Youtube
Surreal Shakespearian fantasy lyrics invoking “moonshine’s watery beams,” several genera of insects, “atomies of athwart men’s noses” and a queen who midwifes for fairies help qualify this genre-bending song for this genre-bending holiday. The musical choices, from singing in the round to using backing vocals as key instruments to writing heart-squeezing, brain-doping harmonies only a music theorist could dream up, are lush like a forest yet refined like a garden, with a rhythm section so in-pocket that you’d have to reach past your keys to fish it out.
“A Witch Stole Sam” (from The Witch)
by Mark Korven | Spotify | Youtube
Following a family exiled to the woods from a colonial New England plantation, The Witch (2015) is transfixing for me in part because it offers a vision of the supernatural anxieties that might have worried New Haven’s own founders. The movie’s soundtrack is minimalist and fractured, clearly not meant to be able to stand alone, but “A Witch Stole Sam” is one track that can. Whole enough to find a place on a spooky playlist, it starts with a ghostly wind, lightly dissonant, and ends with a ghastly wail whirling up into darkness.
“Way Too Long”
by Bent Knee | Spotify | Bandcamp
That wail is plucked from the sky and made humanly scary and beautiful by Courtney Swain, the multi-hyphenate lead singer of Bent Knee, an art rock band full of multi-hyphenates that’s been touring through New Haven for maybe a decade now. “Way Too Long” is a dark showcase of her and the band’s abilities and sensibilities. The taut snare pops like a pistol, the guitar rasps with chainsaw edge, the violin oozes filmic tension and her voice soars over and through and around and below, across a frightening range of vocal techniques and textures while nailing every note. And yep, they play it live.
“Written in Blood”
by She Wants Revenge | Spotify | Youtube
We finish here with a mildly gothic crowd-pleaser set amid a crowd. A spooky warbly synth note presages a clean-cut groove that escalates with smart tom toms, resolute guitars and a baroque, ruffled-collar voice describing a dance-floor encounter I’m sure was positively vampiric. The song culminates in a wisely understated chorus that nevertheless boasts a shout section and a cowbell.
Happy—or exquisitely unhappy—Halloween music, everyone.
Written by Dan Mims. Image, featuring Bent Knee, sourced from @BentKneeMusic.
