Category: Music

The holiday onslaught is upon us

I’m a woman who enjoys the holidays despite being somewhat anti-capitalist, and, though I love a wholly just society, I tire of all the extraordinary analyses of why Thanksgiving is “problematic.”  Columbus was a madman and there’s nothing I can do about it now.  There were pioneers, now we’re all here, some of us are queer, get used to it (and over it)!

As I prepare dishes to take to a family celebration tomorrow, I will use the mental space I receive from performing repetitive tasks to plan Yule gifts I need to make or acquire. I’ll think about where we need to put the tree this year since Boo Radley is what cat experts would call “a complete disaster.” Boo will be frightened of the tree and will become so startled he will leap up into the air, crap at the apex of his ascent, and his poop will hit the ground before he does. Alternately, a strange madness will overtake him and he will race up the tree toward the ceiling, loosening every ornament as he goes, destroying hours of decorating. He will then become afraid of the tree again and this cycle will repeat itself until New Year’s Day. And let us not even speak of Grendel and the Infestation of Two and what they can do to a fully decorated tree in under three minutes of concentrated mayhem. I often feel that had we let wolves into the house it would have been more hygienic and less chaotic.

But as I fret about all the piles of glittery cat yak that are my yuletide fate and the chores I must do before 12/25, I am also thinking about those who have come and gone, the people whose lives were spent in service to their families, who spread joy to their loved ones. Who sacrificed for those they loved. My grandparents, my mother, my step-grandmother, Mr OTC’s grandparents and his step-father. These people served their countries on the home and war fronts. They raised their children to be independent and ethical. They worked jobs for decades, in some cases using skills that were forgotten for a while only to be rediscovered when we realized complete modernity wasn’t quite the utopia we had hoped.

We’ll never have a utopia. Philosophy always beckons, reality always fails. In the meantime we just need to remember those who sacrificed for us, all those people now consigned to a history that is often remembered with mawkish sentimentality or demonized as a whole. In the middle is the truth, and it’s something to be proud of.

What’s our sacrifice? Or rather, what’s mine? I don’t know yet. I don’t think we ever know, most of us, because sacrifice is seldom dramatic. It’s the scope of a life lived in service to others and to ourselves. I have no idea if the scope of my life will be remembered or if it is worthy of remembrance.

But as I ponder historical and familial sacrifice, there are pies to be baked, and I’m going to enjoy baking them and hope that others enjoy eating them. And Tony, if you are reading this, yes, there will be rice krispies treats. Lots of them. Let’s be thankful for that, if nothing else.

Musical influence of Art Bell

I’m going to do my best to post a lot before Halloween because indulging in creepiness is one of the things I do best. I have so many creepy books, favorite creepy movies, and creepy sites to share that it would be a shame not to take advantage of this time of the year and write about all the eerie weirdness rattling around in my head.

This entry came about in my typical circuitous “getting lost on the Internet” method of gathering information. I wanted to discuss some really disturbing, dark songs about child predators, and had a specific song in mind, two songs, actually, about a predator assaulting a child and the child seeking revenge, but couldn’t remember the name of the songs or the band that performed them. In my attempts to run the song to ground, I fell into a YouTube hole that completely distracted me from my original goal. I’ll eventually discuss songs about child predation but not today because I found mystery wondering how many songs there are that are inspired by Art Bell’s Coast to Coast AM. (By the way, the band I was originally searching for is G.G.F.H. and the songs are “Little Missy” and “Missy’s Revenge” and while the songs are still outre and upsetting, they aren’t as viscerally disgusting as they were to me when I heard them years ago. I fear I am becoming jaded…)

Discussing Art Bell’s influence on music is really apropos for me this time of year because I always listen to his Ghost to Ghost episodes right before Halloween. I was putting together a playlist earlier this month but when I was searching for G.G.F.H.’s body of work, I found a title that piqued my interest and it turned out to have an Art Bell sample (the Venetian Snares song I discuss below – that is the song that linked me from child exploitation to Art Bell). After listening to the song with the Coast to Coast AM sample, I decided to see how many songs I could find that were influenced by Art Bell in some manner. Art Bell is interesting and somewhat weird in his own right, a man whose life has taken several unexpected turns, and he has been a personal hero of mine ever since he sued Ted Gunderson (who is hopefully right this very minute encountering the Satan he insisted was lurking in every daycare and influencing every politician since Washington) for slandering him as a pedophile.

Art no longer hosts Coast to Coast AM (and while George Noory is okay enough, he lacks a certain edge, I think, that Art brought to the table) but his long tenure on the AM and online radio program featured many bizarre and memorable shows. One of the most memorable was the night a man who claimed he was a former Area 51 employee called into the show in a panic, revealing that the US government was being duped by inhuman creatures posing as aliens from outer space, and that these creatures meant mankind harm. He claimed to be on the run from the federal government and sounded to be completely unhinged by the gravity of his discovery. In the middle of the phone call, something happened to the satellite and at least 50 separate radio stations went dead for around half an hour. Understandably, this caused Art and his listeners to freak out, assuming that indeed the feds were tracking the frightened caller and had interfered with his attempt to share his story. The man behind the Area 51 call eventually called back to Coast to Coast and explained it was indeed a hoax but that he had no idea what had happened in regards to the satellite failure. That, evidently, was just a coincidence. There are some who still believe the Area 51 caller was real and that the later call revealing the hoax is the real hoax, but that is the nature of conspiracy. This episode is called either the “Area 51 Caller” or “The Frantic Caller.”

However real or fake the Area 51 call may have been, it’s now a part of Area 51 lore and anyone who has much interest in fringe or conspiracy culture has likely heard of it. It’s definitely influenced some musicians, famous and obscure. One of the more famous bands to sample the Area 51 call is Tool, in the song “Faaip de Oiad” from the album, Lateralus Faaip de Oiad means “the voice of God” in “Enochian” (the supposed angelic language recorded and likely invented by John Dee and Edward Kelley) – Maynard Keenan is a sort of Renaissance man of the weird and I think he runs a winery now, of all things.


“Faaip de Oiad” doesn’t freak me out the way it does many Tool fans. I think that’s because I’ve heard the source material too many times, and had heard it many times before ever hearing this song. But I can see how this would be jarring or alarming to someone who might not know the source of the jangled, frightened man talking in the middle of the song. I link to this particular video because it has the “lyrics” in the upload notes section.

Continue Reading “Musical influence of Art Bell”

Job for a Cowboy and Morten Klode

Most death metal is dead to me these days. When I was younger I could tolerate indecipherable growls because the genre was still new and interesting enough to offset my neurotic desire to understand what was being sung. Though some of the bands were understandable to me, like Hypocrisy, Opeth and Amon Amarth, for me the growls were more of an instrument than actual vocals. These days not so much. The genre has suffered a sort of recursive plague wherein all the bands seem to blend together to me and the growls no longer seem like a deliberate attempt to evoke chaos and darkness as much as they seem aggressively derivative. Worse, much of the content in death metal has taken on a cartoonish slant, so bludgeoning and over-the-top that it no longer seems outre but rather seems ridiculous bordering on tiresome. I find myself listening to more melodic death metal, which means I also find myself listening to folk metal and, god help me, prog rock hybrids.

All of this exposition hopefully explains why I haven’t been paying attention to death metal and how the band Job for a Cowboy and, more specifically, their video for “Tarnished Gluttony” are just now coming to my attention. I need to listen to more of the band’s songs to see what I think of them as a whole but I was really impressed with “Tarnished Gluttony” as a song and especially as a video. The singer(s?)’s vocals are completely unintelligible to me but there is a theatricality to the music that renders a lack of understanding far less important. The growls verge into screams that harked back to the days when black metal didn’t fill me with despair. But before I praise the band’s style overmuch, I need to track down more of their body of work. Until then, let’s discuss this video.

Warning: This video is violent, gory, and features the death of a child.


I watch this video every night before going to sleep because I’m sort of obsessed with it. It’s almost like a bedtime story, and given how much an homage it is to Lovecraft, it’s a creepy story, too, though no creepier than anything Perrault wrote as a fairy tale.

When I first discovered this video I watched it several times in a row and then forced Mr OTC to watch it too (and he actually enjoyed it, no small praise for a song when a man is mostly into old country, zydeco, and, inexplicably, the Talking Heads). We both have read Lovecraft but of the two of us Mr OTC is the far bigger Lovecraft fan and it took him a couple of goes before he had a handle on what was happening.

Of course now it is clear that a Lovecraftian Deep One sired a child with a human, and that child appears fully human (though in the literature Deep Ones could maintain a completely human appearance until they reached adolescence and sometimes even later). It seems as if the Deep One is sacrificing his human child to Dagon, returning the boy to the sea. And the only reason I even wanted to find out what exactly was happening in this video was because of the nuanced and emotional acting skills of Morten Klode, the actor who portrayed the adult Deep One.

His grimaces and hesitations show he is not a particularly willing participant in this sacrifice. His tender stroking of the boy’s cheek shows affection for this child – this isn’t some random kid a Lovecraftian horror is killing to appease an Old One. His rushed hurry to begin once he realizes the child may be awakening shows he has no wish to cause this child pain. His anguished scream at 4:01, after the sacrifice has begun – it was deeply affecting the first time I saw it.

But there are some seriously creepy elements to this video. The undressing of a small, unconscious child in the woods is unnerving. And of course eviscerating said child is difficult content. The most unsettling part of this video for me was when the Deep One licked the needle before he began to stitch up the child’s abdomen. Anyone who has sewn much knows that sometimes a blunt needle or pin needs lubrication before it can penetrate certain cloth. It’s unlikely that this needle needed any help with the first stitch into the child’s stomach but that lick of a blunt needle or pin is often the reflexive action of a person well-accustomed to old-fashioned diapers using safety pins. A quick lick of the pin ensures it goes through the thick flannel quickly and there’s less chance of pricking a squirming child. You don’t see that too much these days with prefolds and velcro tabs and the like and I am very likely assigning a motive to this action that is not part of the directorial intent but for me this small action was fatherly, showing a man who had, at some point in the past, cared for this little boy, a man who knew his way around the more visceral elements of child-rearing taken to an extreme. And the way he blankly threw the needle away. Just the numb disgust and misery written all over his face. It was a mild devastation when he tossed that needle into the leaves.

It’s remarkable when a music video engages in such attention to detail, and all the more remarkable when it is a death metal video engaging in such nuance. I’ve become accustomed to the aforementioned club-across-the-face approach of songs and videos like Cattle Decapitation’s “Forced Gender Reassignment.” (Jesus Christ, this link is NSFW and NSFL). I get and sort of approve of the intent behind the song and video but if I want to assault my psyche that way I can just watch Human Centipede II: The Full Sequence and at least then I know what the hell everyone is saying.

(For the record I had to look up the lyrics for “Tarnished Gluttony” and the song is kind of up my alley, lyrically, but the video is not related to the song’s content in any manner that seems obvious to me.)

Morten Klode reminds me of someone. I don’t know who but his face is damnably familiar to me. As I saw him acting in this video my mind was clicking away in the background as I tried to determine where I had seen him before. I looked him up and he has only three credits on his IMDb page and I’ve only seen one of them, this video. Yet each time I watch it a feeling of familiarity washes over me. I hope Klode finds himself with more work in the future. You don’t expect to find acting chops of this caliber in a music video – I’m actually rather surprised to see that he doesn’t already have a feature-length film under his belt.

Any other videos or bands you think will impress me this much? If so, let me know. And let me know what you think of this video (and if you have any work for which Morten Klode would be a good fit, hire him – we need to see more of this man in film!).

God speed, Wes Craven

Wes Craven died this evening.  Evidently he had brain cancer.  He was 76, which still seems far too young for him to die.

Everyone knows him from the Nightmare on Elm Street films.   The first in the series was quite good, but eventually Freddy Krueger became too campy, the intensity of the horror lost among cringe-inducing puns.

Less acclaimed but, in my opinion, far superior to the Elm Street series was People Under the Stairs.  That film managed to include just about every hot button that comes up in horror films – sick secluded family, racist abuse, incest, child abuse, among them – and combined them all into a film so creepy that, were it not for the fashions involved, still seems very modern in its approach to real horror.

Mostly I will remember Wes Craven for being the architect of a film that absolutely destroyed me when I first saw it.  In Last House on the Left, an update of Bergman’s The Virgin Spring, Mari and Phyllis are waylaid during their attempts to find drugs before a concert.  Their abductors take them into the woods to torture, rape and eventually murder them.  Their murderers end up needing assistance from Mari’s family and Mari’s parents realize the people in their home killed their child and seek violent revenge.

There is a scene in this film where Mari, after she has been raped and mutilated, walks into a lake to clean herself.  Once she is out into the lake, her captors shoot her to death and she begins to float, her long hair clinging to the surface of the water, spreading out in a corona around her.  Of all the horrible images and acts in this film, that image of Mari in the water is the one that stays with me and there’s no wonder why.  Young women floating dead in water is an image that has been with us for centuries.  Ophelia instantly comes to mind.  So does the Lady of Shallot, though she was in a boat.  Most relevant for me is L’Inconnue de la Seine, a beautiful young woman found dead in the Seine in the late 1880s.  Her death mask became a collector’s piece and her image now graces all Resusci Annie mannequins used to train people to perform CPR.  She was considered an example of perfect female beauty.  Her story was told over and over in literature and art and I’ve linked her with Mari in my mind, two lost young girls, killed vilely but washed clean.

Though dubbed an exploitation film, Last House on the Left appalled 1972 moviegoers with its audacious and all-too-real violence, but the movie was far more than just a vehicle for splatter and gore.  It tugged at the primal needs of mankind to protect the young and vulnerable among us, and reminded us how quickly the suburban family can become atavistic killers when their own are threatened or harmed.  It taps into the very fairy tales that make up our earliest introductions to literature, telling us of little children lured into the woods and those foolhardy enough to walk into danger on their own.  In so many ways the film harked back to the gruesome violence of the early, unsanitized Grimm tales that we’d forgotten after so many Disney reinterpretations, tropes that we glossed over because we felt we were far too civilized to share with our children the real danger of following breadcrumbs, or, in Mari and Phyllis’s case, knocking on the witch’s door.

Wes Craven was a genius who understood the primal violence that threatens us and how easily we shed our modernity and squeamishness when we need to protect those we love or seek vengeance against those who harm us.

Wes was also a man who understood so well the tropes of the genre he helped create that he seamlessly subverted them in the Scream series, an almost intolerably self-aware and clever look at how we again all learned the danger of going into the woods – horror movies showed us the danger – but we end up in the woods nonetheless.  Knowing rules saved few from the knife.

There is so much more that can be said about Wes Craven but I am going to leave it alone now, and perhaps watch The Serpent and the Rainbow again this week.  God speed, Mr Craven.

“Praise Abort,” Christopher Walken and Bodil Joensen

This entire entry is NSFW.  And in some regards, NSFL, but if you’re reading here you’re probably made of stern stuff.  But be warned – most of this entry could get you fired if your IT team at work is on the ball.

Peter Tägtgren (of Hypocrisy and Pain fame) teamed up with Til Lindemann from Rammstein in a project called Lindemann and the first single, at first listen, was a paean to sexual frustration and complete misanthropy. I’m always up for that which is sexually uncomfortable and I sort of loathe most of humanity, so “Praise Abort” was up my alley. It was also deeply funny and we need more humor in music, I think. God knows “Praise Abort” would be a complete mental massacre without some humor.

I’ve not followed Peter Tägtgren’s career that closely. When I was but a wee lass, I listened to Hypocrisy from time to time.  I checked out Pain on YouTube and the first video that came up was for a song called “Shut Your Mouth.”  Tägtgren is obviously not a dude adverse to humor in his music, and the video for “Shut Your Mouth” verges into silliness.  But whether or not you like humor in your metal, how can you not like a song with a chorus like “Just wipe your own ass and shut your mouth!”

And because I am a hopelessly shallow woman, I can say that now that I know that Peter Tägtgren is no longer a metallic ringer for Johnny Depp

peterjohnny

and is transforming into Christopher Walken, I find him far more interesting and can see myself checking out more Pain once this discussion is completed.

peterchristopher

Continue Reading ““Praise Abort,” Christopher Walken and Bodil Joensen”

Stuff is happening, as well as things

This post originally appeared on I Read Odd Books

So sorry for the silence on my end.  I’ve been writing quite a bit, so much in fact that I have written myself into a corner.  Every Cradle Is a Grave came into my life as I was experiencing death and the rage and depression death brings with it.  I have written over 20,000 words about the book and, though I am well-known for my wordiness, that is a wholly inappropriate number of words to use to discuss a book.  I am self-indulgent but luckily I still have a bit of self-awareness and now I am spending time editing so that I can present my frame of mind regarding the book without substituting my frame of mind for the book.  I will have the discussion up early next week.

I will also have another “middle of the road” discussion up either tomorrow or Thursday.

I’ve been immersed in some interesting media and topics this week, one of which turned into a rabbit-hole.  I follow the “Unresolved Mysteries” subreddit and a German user posted about a murder I had never heard of and as a result I have been scouring the Internet, reading crappy translations of old German news articles, finding every detail I can about it.  In 1998, thirteen year old Tristan Bruebach was murdered in such a sexually specific and audacious manner that I cannot believe I had not heard of this murder before and I also cannot believe this was the sole time the murderer performed such a killing. But against all logic, it seems like that is the case.  Seriously, three decades of reading and studying and I have never heard of a murder like this, and there are so many strange details about Tristan, his activities before his murder, and the way he was killed that even seasoned professional criminologists are baffled by the case.

I’ve also been listening to the Michigan band His Name Is Alive almost non-stop.  I don’t know how to describe this sort of music and the band has continually evolved since the late 80s so it’s hard to pigeon-hole the effort.  The only constant member of the band is Warren Defever, with different musicians and singers coming and going.

A friend of mine in college gave me a mixed tape with “Baby Fish Mouth” on it but it was the early 90s, no iTunes and precious little Internet outside of university labs, and tracking down small, indie bands was harder then. I finally got a copy of the album, Mouth by Mouth, and every song was worthwhile, which seldom ever seems to happen. The singer on this track, Karin Oliver, performed with HNIA for several years but evidently is now an account manager at a marketing firm.


“How Ghosts Affect Relationships” is from the album Livonia, released in 1990. It wasn’t until this album got uploaded to YouTube that I could access it. I don’t know if it’s rare or if it’s just that I wasn’t thorough. This is the best song on the album, I think, and it’s a little musical knife in my heart.


“How Dark Is Your Dark Side” is not the best song on Xmmer, a 2007 album, but I listen to it over and over because I love the singer, Andrea Morici. There is something sweetly hypnotic about her voice on this track. I think she may be the best vocalist to work with Defever.

So that’s where I am. Buried in hyperemotional reactions to a book about antinatalism, searching for information about a savagely murdered child, and listening to experimental rock. See you soon with a short entry about two short story collections that disappointed me sincerely.

This Is Not an Odd Book Discussion: Stuff. And Things.

This post originally appeared on I Read Odd Books

Just talking with you guys. “I think the young people enjoy it when I get down verbally, don’t you?”*

–I had a really good entry planned for today but it required a scanner and evidently our scanner is no longer a scanner. Maybe it’s a toaster now. Maybe it’s a small space heater. It is a mystery, but we do know for sure it’s not a device that can capture an image. So Mr. Oddbooks will be purchasing a new scanner this weekend and I will have a nice discussion about death photography up on Monday.

–Think Progress had a very interesting article about how one can consume good content created by horrible people. Roman Polanski and Orson Scott Card are the focus of the article but I see this question come up a lot in regards to black metal, specifically Varg Vikernes. On the other side of the coin that I explore more often is how to ethically handle really morally upsetting content that comes from people who are not bad people – like Peter Sotos’ works. I’d love to know how y’all handle such issues. I can’t see ever giving a single penny of mine to a man like Card, who opposes equal protection under law for roughly 10% of the people in this country, but this article gives a full story of what hinges on the success of the upcoming Ender’s Game movie, issues that go beyond not giving one’s money to a bigoted man.

–There will be some changes coming here on IROB. We are going to begin monetizing the site and it makes me nervous. I’ve built up a respectable body of work over here and I don’t want to taint it but, at the same time, site ads are so ubiquitous at this point that it’s hard to claim they do any harm to a site. The problems arise, I think, when bloggers begin to engage in sponsored content. That doesn’t happen much with book bloggers, unless you consider review copies a form of sponsoring. Which I don’t.

I am also going to start accepting ads from writers who are in the position of having to publicize their own books. The cost for a monthly will be super-cheap. I will be offering ad space once I have a solid track record of posting at least two book discussions a week. I don’t have extraordinary traffic on this site, but I do have a solid readership of people who often buy books as a result of my discussions. At any rate, that is coming up sometime during the summer.

If you guys notice anything amiss with the ads, probably strictly Google Adsense, please let me know. If anything we add screws up your experience on this site, we need to know.

People have mentioned tip jars and subscriptions and the like. I feel more uncomfortable with that than ads. Some people’s blogs are like magazines and worth subscribing to, but this site is me, me only and I don’t ever see having guest or co-bloggers. I’ve also grown disgusted with the antics one sees from uber-feminist-blogger-beggar Melissa McEwan, who routinely berates her readers for money so she can get a living wage from blogging, going so far as to have one of her co-mods tell a woman with five dollars left from her child support money to fork it over to help support Melissa, a comfortable, middle-class, childless woman with a husband who supports her. I’m a middle-class childless woman with a husband who supports me and the only time any of you should part with money because of anything I said is when I recommend a book you decide you want to buy. And though I know she is an extreme example, McEwan’s antics (and the antics of others like her who failed to make a viable business plan before making blogging their source of income) have forever tainted the tip jar for me. The fact is that magazines don’t make much money from subscriptions – they make money from ads and it’s a piss-poor business plan to expect readers to pay your wages just because you think it taints you if you take corporate money.

–I got an e-mail from a guy in Croatia who praised IROB, but also told me that when he watched the video for “Ride” by Lana Del Rey, he thought of me. I watched the video and was baffled. I asked Mr. Oddbooks what part of my online persona would make anyone think of me when they watch a video about a biker prostitute with borderline personality and a daddy-complex. He watched the video and he understood immediately what my Croatian admirer meant. Though this is clearly in the Southwest somewhere, like Arizona or Nevada, this is likely how a lot of people look at Texas. Wild landscape with lots of sand, people in fringe wearing boots with shorts, lots of beer bottles, lots of guns. I replied and asked him if he meant the landscape and rather than the girl in the video, but never heard back.

For what it’s worth, here’s the video:

As melodramatic videos go, this one ain’t bad. If I was 18, I bet I’d be all over this. Sadly, the middle-aged me mentally told the pretty, drunk girl in the middle of the desert with a bunch of bikers to take off the war bonnet, put the gun away, and sober up and that would be good step toward not feeling fucking crazy. But the American cinematic and literary experience she’s grooving on was built on the backs of pretty, drunk, fucking crazy people. Where would we be as a country without attractive people who are out of their minds. So thanks, Croatian Man, for leading me to this video. It was a hoot, of sorts.

*Though I in no way resemble Lana Del Rey’s daddy-biker girl in this video, I was told frequently in my teens that I reminded people of Jordan from Real Genius, which is the movie from which this quote originates. I’m way fatter now and talk a little bit slower but my neuroses are far more Jordan-eqsue than the languid lunacy Lana Del Rey brings to the table. But ending up with the dorky genius was a far better fate for me than wearing a white dress and screaming at bikers. Mileage, as always, varies.

This Is Not An Odd Book Discussion – Late night David Lynch

This post originally appeared on I Read Odd Books

I used to be a fan of black metal, and I guess I still am, but now it’s more appropriate to say I’m a fan of specific black metal bands. It always helps to be specific, I think.

So in the spirit of specificity, let me tell you I rather like Ulver. I think even more specifically, it’s safe to say I like Garm, the former singer for Ulver. I love his voice, and I like the idea that if Mr Oddbooks were to start lifting weights again and decided to get some ink, he and Garm could pass for brothers. Maybe cousins.

At any rate, Ulver’s 2000 release, Perdition City, is in my top ten albums of all time. And the best song on that album is “Porn Piece or the Scars of Cold Kisses.” At 4:00 one morning, I wanted to listen to it in bed, but iTunes was having “issues.” I was forced to go to YouTube, which was not as an appalling a choice as you might think because it just so happens that there is a fan video for “Porn Piece or the Scars of Cold Kisses” that is my favorite fan video ever. Yeah, the video is stretched and skewed but ultimately, the video is very, very good. I don’t think I could ever have thought of “Porn Piece” and Lost Highway as two media elements that went together, but that’s the beauty of this kind of thing, I suspect. Also, I tend to think that imposing one’s will on popular culture is all that’s left to us people who can’t sleep and yet can’t concentrate on anything productive.

So beautiful. “On the stairs, before I left, one of the girls had surprisingly given me a kiss. Stung in the cold long after.”

But it was Youtube at 4:00 in the morning. It couldn’t end in a great mashup of an achingly beautiful song. It never does.

It never does.

You know how Youtube has all the related videos over to the right in one endless and godless lineup?

I looked at those related videos. I learned something. I learned that David Lynch released an album late in 2011. It is called Crazy Clown Time.

I’ll let that soak in for minute.

Crazy.

Clown.

Time.

And it sounds exactly like you think it would and you should not listen to this before the sun comes up. You should not listen to this as your Garm-like husband sleeps with his hands closed across his chest, an elderly cat at his feet, your house quiet, your neighborhood dead. You should not listen to this song even now, but you probably will because the curiosity will force you.

Here it is. The thing that currently haunts me.

I…

I just don’t know. Words fail me. That was horrible. I kind of want to cry.

But because he is David Lynch, in the midst of the grotesque, there is also something truly beautiful. “Pinky’s Dream” is slightly jittery and mildly horrible, but still has lovely moments

But like much of Lynch’s body of work, you have to make a conscious choice: do you focus on the lovely or the grotesque? Do you focus on Isabella’s lips and her accent or Dennis Hopper and his fucking nitrous mask?

You focus on Dennis and the mask.

Fuck.

This Is Not an Odd Book Discussion – Songs screaming at me

This post originally appeared on I Read Odd Books

I think my off-topic entries I had previously called “Media Dump” will now be called “This Is Not An Odd Book Discussion.” My media dumps were really just media trickles. Better call them what they are: “This Is Not an Odd Book Discussion.”

With that out of the way, let’s talk about a mild but still unsettling musical experience I had recently. I was listening to “Diane” by Hüsker Dü and though I have known of and played this song since I was 16, there was something new to it. I could hear something in it I had not heard before. I am not a person who has a wide musical vocabulary so bear with me if what I am saying sounds amateurish and if you have a better explanation for what I am trying to say, please speak up.

The weird feeling of hearing something new focused around Bob Mould’s guitar work. The clearest example of the part that started niggling the back of my head happened around 0:22 – 0:33. His guitar work is sort of shrill and desperate. You hear those chords throughout the song.

Because I have a touch of OCD in my genetic makeup, once that feeling that I was remembering something hit me, I had to listen to the song over and over until Mr Oddbooks begged me to give it a rest because some people have to get up in the morning, dammit.

And I was lucky he was so desperate for sleep because putting it aside for a day or so enabled my brain to clear and it became apparent what I was thinking of when I was listening to “Diane.” It was a song I have already and recently discussed, “We Are Water” by Health.

I do not know what the instrument is that makes the upsurge of noise that occurs at 0:41-0:46 and again at 2:06-2:13. And the tempo is not even similar to Mould’s guitar work in “Diane.” But there is something about that shrill noise from both songs that caused me to link the songs in my brain.

But then the obviousness of it settled in. I said in my last discussion of “We Are Water” that the surge of noise I delineated above reminds me of screams after seeing the video. Mould’s guitar work is shrill, a sort of on-edge sound that I now also associate with screams because “Diane” was written about a woman, Diane Edwards, who was killed in 1980. She was a waitress in St. Paul, MN, and she was 19 when a man named Joseph Ture abducted, raped and murdered her.

Having heard that jangling noise in “We Are Water” and associating it with screaming after seeing the video of the young woman or man being chased down by a demented killer, I think I had that association of discordant noise as a female scream implanted in my head. And now all of Bob Mould’s guitar work in “Diane” sounds like screams, too.

I wanted this to be a synchronous event. I wanted there there be more coincidence to it than there was. Eric Wareheim (yes, that Eric Wareheim) directed the video for “We Are Water” and was once in a sort of punk band himself. I looked him up, certain he was born in Minnesota and had grown up on Hüsker Dü. Perhaps he felt the same sense of being screamed at as he listened to both songs and had “Diane” in his mind when he created the video.

No luck. He’s from Pennsylvania. It’s all just in my brain. As usual. I bet people reading this and listening to the songs at the appropriate places will not hear a damn thing I did. And that’s cool. I often go through these weird musings wherein I see connections that a normal person does not hear. I’m used to it. And really, given that “Diane” is about a murder victim, had I any sensitivity, I should have heard the screams before. Regardless, I can’t listen to these songs again for a while because now I hear a real woman screaming at me and I have enough really horrible stuff going through my head at the moment.

So, dear readers, are there any songs that began to fuck you up in ways you didn’t expect when you first heard the song? What’s your version of suddenly hearing a woman screaming in a guitar part in a song you had heard for years?