Let’s make one thing glaringly plain right at the start: This is not a Halloween playlist. So if you’re expecting “Monster Mash” or “Ghostbusters” or any of that sort of business, you’re trick-or-treating at the wrong door. The songs assembled here are meant instead for ushering in Samhain, a holiday that occurs at the same time as—and is a predecessor to—Halloween, but has different, decidedly older origins. But make no mistake, things surrounding Samhain can still get plenty creepy.
It’s essentially an end-of-harvest commemoration that is Gaelic in origin and goes back at least to the 10th century if not farther. It’s generally reckoned to be connected to paganism, and some of the spooky rites and rituals connected to it (which have also been an inspiration on Halloween) bear that out. But there’s also an organic and naturalistic, almost folksy side to it. Check out the classic ’70s movie thriller The Wicker Man (represented here) some time and you’ll get an idea of that intersection, albeit slanted distinctly toward the dark side.
Then again, positioned as it is to herald the oncoming winter, Samhain is known as the harbinger of the “dark half” of the calendar year. So that darkness manifests itself in more ways than one. And the Samhain-friendly songs here fall all across the spectrum. On one end, you’ve got the gentle folky stuff, be it Led Zeppelin’s “Battle of Evermore,” Jethro Tull’s “Songs from the Wood,” or Loreena McKennitt’s “All Souls Night.” Then there’s the moodier, more intense, dancing-naked-in-the-moonlight vibe represented by the likes of Dead Can Dance, Kate Bush, and Faith and The Muse. And on the most unsettling side, you’ve got Black Sabbath, Bruce Dickinson, and Electric Wizard conjuring classic metallic, black-magic imagery.
Some of these tunes have an explicitly subject-specific spin, and some may simply fit the feel, but brought together they provide a soundtrack for the full range of Samhain moods.
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Tragic losses, grizzly murders, brutal tales of revenge — many hip-hop lyrics already have a lot in common with the plotlines of slasher flicks. This mix takes the correlation one step further, compiling a sweeping range of rap tracks featuring horror movie soundtrack samples. The drama of Cage’s “Weather People” is exponentially increased by his use of Goblin’s score to Suspiria, while Project Pat’s “Red Rum” makes use of the sinister music from The Shining. “See you in the club, now we walkin’ you out/ Shoulda thought twice ‘fo you went and opened your mouth,” raps Busta Rhymes in “Gimme Some More.” The lyrics are ominous, to be sure, but when heard over Bernard Herrmann’s music from Psycho, the circumstances seem decidedly more dire. While it’s a cheeky concept, the mix flows surprisingly well, with John Carpenter’s Halloween theme (sampled six times!) serving as a recurring motif to tie the whole thing together. -- Adam Rothbarth
You know the segment of the horror and sci-fi movie spectrum we’re talking about here. The worse they are, the better they are; the lower the budget, the higher the entertainment value. And the more goofy and outlandish the plot, the more there is to love about it. They operate in an entirely different universe than venerated, “legit” horror films like, say, The Exorcist or Rosemary’s Baby. They’re the kind of movies that turn up in the wee hours on TV, or maybe in a cult film festival if you’re lucky.
Some of the songs assembled here pay direct homage to some of those films. For instance, Roky Erickson’s “I Walked With a Zombie,” John Cooper Clarke’s “(I Married a) Monster from Outer Space,” and Screaming Lord Sutch & The Savages’ “Dracula’s Daughter” are all inspired by the films that bear those titles. And after recording “House of 1000 Corpses,” Rob Zombie took matters into his own hands and directed his own movie of the same name.
Then there are the tunes that suggest an alternative history of cheesy horror movies, ones that never actually existed but sound like they should have. Blondie’s “The Attack of the Giant Ants,” The Hollywood Brats’ “Vampire Nazi,” and The Cramps’ “Burn She-Devil, Burn” are creations that originated entirely in the minds of the musicians, but after you hear them it’s hard to resist imagining them coming to life at three in the morning on your TV screen.
It’s the perfect playlist to fire up when All Hallows’ Eve rolls around, but if you’re a lover of B movies and vintage cinematic kitsch, these tunes will do the trick whenever you’ve got the urge to get gloriously tacky on the scary side.
What’s This Playlist All About? Forget “Thriller” and “Monster Mash”: This here is a mix made of true nightmares. Toss aside that old scary-sounds cassette tape, and choose this playlist as your ultimate Halloween soundtrack—especially if you’d prefer to scare off those trick-or-treaters for good.
What You Get: This is the gist, in Rolling Stone’s own words: “vintage murder ballads, dissonant classical spine-tinglers, psychedelic freak-outs, shock-rock creep-outs, Southern gothic alt-rock gloom, art-noise desolation and more.” Their list is presented in chronological order, starting with the 1930 folk standard “The Murder of the Lawson Family,” a real-life story of one Charlie Lawson, who murdered his wife and six of seven children. From there, we’re taken on a haunting journey through the years, with The Louvin Brothers’ heavenly Appalachian harmonies detailing a bloody murder (“Knoxville Girl”), Hungarian composer György Ligeti drawing out every possible anxiety with a single organ (“Volumina”), Leonard Cohen stoically claiming, “It is your flesh that I wear” (“Avalanche”), and plenty of other brooding bards like Nick Cave, Scott Walker, and Tom Waits laying out tales of horror and depravity.
Greatest Discovery: There’s something oddly satisfying about Tori Amos’ whispery, theatrical interpretation of Eminem’s murder fantasy “’97 Bonnie & Clyde,” in which he imagines killing his wife Kim and tossing her dead body into a lake, with his baby daughter along for the ride. Amos lures you right into the disgusting scene itself, exposing way more about the rapper than he ever could himself.
Most Terrifying of Them All: There’s nothing that will ever beat the relentless motor buzz that ripples underneath Throbbing Gristle’s “Hamburger Lady” as Genesis P-Orridge recites words from a letter written by a medic in Vietnam who cared for a woman who had horrific burns covering the top half of her body. Seriously, just try to listen to this one with the lights off.
The ’90s have never sounded better than they do right now—especially for modern-day indie rockers. There’s no shortage of bands banging around these days whose sound suggests formative phases spent soaking up vintage ’90s indie rock. Not that the neo-’90s sound is itself a new thing. As soon as the era was far enough away in the rearview mirror to allow for nostalgia to set in (i.e., the second half of the 2000s), there were already some young artists out there onboarding ’90s alt-rock influences. But more recently, there’s been a bumper crop of bands that betray a soft spot for a time when MTV still played music videos and streaming was just something that happened in a restroom. In this context, the literate, lo-fi approach of Pavement has emerged as a particularly strong strand of the ’90s indie tapestry, and it isn’t hard to hear echoes of their sound in the work of more recent arrivals like Kiwi jr. or Teenage Cool Kids. Cherry Glazerr frontwoman Clementine Creevy seems to have a feeling for the kind of big, dirty guitar riffs that made Pacific Northwestern bands the kings of the alt-rock heap once upon a time. The world-weary, wise-guy angularity of Car Seat Headrest can bring to mind the lurching, loose-limbed attack of Railroad Jerk. And laconic, storytelling types like Nap Eyes stand to prove that there’s still a bright future ahead for those who mourn the passing of Silver Jews main man David Berman. But perhaps the best thing about a face-off between the modern indie bands evoking ’90s forebears and the old-school artists themselves is the fact that in this kind of competition, everybody wins.
It may be that 2019 was the best year for ’90s metal since, well, 1999. Bands from the decade of Judgment Night re-emerged with new creative twists and tweaks: Tool stretched out into polyrhythmic madness, Korn bludgeoned with more extreme and raw despair, Slipknot added a new drummer (Max Weinberg’s kid!) who gave them a new groove, and Rammstein wrote an anti-fascism anthem that caused controversy in Germany (and hit No. 1 there too). Elsewhere, icons of the era returned in unique ways: Nine Inch Nails’ Trent Reznor scored a superhero TV series, Primus’ Les Claypool teamed up with Sean Lennon for some quirky psych rock, and Faith No More’s Mike Patton made an avant-decadent LP with ’70s soundtrack king Jean-Claude Vannier. Finally, the soaring voice of Linkin Park’s Chester Bennington returned for a moment thanks to Lamb of God guitarist Mark Morton, who released a song they recorded together in 2017.
Taking a look at the playlists for my show on Boston’s WZBC might give the more seasoned college-radio listener a bit of déjà vu: They’re filled with bands like Versus, Team Dresch, and Sleater-Kinney, who were at the top of the CMJ charts back in the ’90s. But the records they released in 2019 turned out to be some of the year’s best rock. Versus, whose Ex Nihilo EP and Ex Voto full-length were part of a creative run for leader Richard Baluyut that also included a tour by his pre-Versus outfit Flower and his 2000s band +/-, put out a lot of beautifully thrashy rock; Team Dresch returned with all cylinders blazing and singers Jody Bleyle and Kaia Wilson wailing their hearts out on “Your Hands My Pockets”; and Sleater-Kinney confronted middle age head-on with their examination of finding one’s footing, The Center Won’t Hold.
Italian guitar heroes Uzeda—who have been putting out proggy, riff-heavy music for three-plus decades—released their first record in 13 years, the blistering Quocumque jerceris stabit; Imperial Teen, led by Faith No More multi-instrumentalist Roddy Bottum, kept the weird hooks coming with Now We Are Timeless; and high-concept Californians That Dog capped off a year of reissues with Old LP, their first album since 1997. Juliana Hatfield continued the creative tear she’s been on this decade with two albums: Weird, a collection of hooky, twisty songs that tackle alienation with searing wit, and Juliana Hatfield Sings the Police, her tribute record to the dubby New Wave chart heroes (in the spirit of the salute to Olivia Newton-John she released in 2018). And our playlist finishes with Mary Timony, formerly of the gnarled rockers Helium and currently part of the power trio Ex Hex, paying tribute to her former Autoclave bandmate Christina Billotte via an Ex Hex take on “What Kind of Monster Are You?,” one of the signature songs by Billotte’s ’90s triple threat Slant 6.
