Halloween is upon us and one of those things that always comes up around this time of year is Halloween-ish music.
Spooky music comes in all shapes and varieties but there are two main paths for tunes that will to make the atmosphere at your party a little more Halloween flavored.
I am excluding The Monster Mash from this piece for obvious reasons.
Root one is popular music.
You can go with old school blues like Robert Johnson whose songs tend to reference the Devil and Hell a fair bit not to mention the legend of his deal with said Biblical entity for his guitar prowess. Other older acts that you can throw in there are “Screamin” Jay Hawkins who in many ways was one of the first “shock” rockers, using voodoo imagery for his stage shows. The fact the man may have had somewhere around 50 to 75 children is also pretty scary unto itself. Then going down the line you can go with people like Alice Cooper, various death and black metal records.
Bands like Iron Maiden have a ton of songs that work for the season. The Cure's Trilogy (Pornography, Disintegration, Bloodflowers) albums are also good for dark and dreary as are the soundtracks to The Blair Witch Project and The Crow. There's also a number of hip hop acts that fall into these lines as well, Insane Clown Posse being the best and most prominent act.
The other root that can be taken is through film scores.
Think of how many film scores to horror films are not only catchy but iconic. Mike Oldfield's Tubular Bells for instance. Not that many of the general public remembers it as that mind you but the moment you start playing it, it is instantly recognized due to it's connection with The Exorcist. John Carpenter's score to the original Halloween is also another example of a horror score that has stuck around rather well through the ages.
But one of the best scores...well okay half a score, is The Unreleased Themes for Hellraiser from Coil.
Coil was essentially two guys, Peter Christopherson (aka Sleazy) and John Balance. Both Peter and John had come out of the experimental electronic band Psychic TV (and before that Peter had been a part of industrial godfathers, Throbbing Gristle) and their music was pretty much straddling lines of industrial, electronic, acid house and other such genres. Somewhere around 1987, horror novelist Clive Barker approached Coil in regards to doing the score for his first film, Hellraiser. Coil being on a friendly basis with Barker agreed and began work. In fact Peter and John lent Barker some S&M and fetish magazines which influenced the look of the Cenobites (the demons in the film, Pinhead being the best known). Clive has also described the music of Coil as making his “bowls churn”.
This was meant as a compliment.
What happened next is a little bit of hearsay.
What is generally noted is that Hollywood or Barker decided that Coil's score was not going to be commercial enough and went with a more traditional score by Christopher Young. Coil has said that they pulled out when it looked like their work wasn't going to be used and thus only six tracks were completed and eventually released as Unreleased Themes for Hellraiser (and then eventually included in a Coil compilation called Unnatural History II).
But man, those five tracks are creepy.
For Coil, they are a bit different. Very clean and almost very 80's film score like but there is just something to them. Something very wrong yet very right at the same time. The piece entitled Box Theme for instance incorporates a child's music box song into it but the sample just sets a sort of record skip into it that sends a little shiver up my spine. The build in a way that if you have them on in the background, by the time it gets to Attack of the Senepods, the music has become rather unsettling. If you can find this, put it on at your next Halloween party, see how it goes.
And if you want to add a bonus track to it, Coil also did a cover of Tainted Love that is bar none, one of the creepiest pieces of music ever done. Look it up and listen to it in the dark, pretty intense stuff.