1. Elements of Need, Spanish Horses. A man is perturbed to find blood on his shirt. One of those gentle-then-screechy records from when emo was a cathartic release, not a way of categorizing commercialized punk.
2. Dream Syndicate, Halloween. I came to this song late, from the I Was a Teenage Zombie movie soundtrack. But it now so entrenched in my being that I can’t think of the holiday without humming it.
3. The Buoys, Timothy. Rupert Holmes’ most audacious three minutes, in a career filled with mystery and audacity. A garage pop single about caved-in miners eating their friend Timothy. I interviewed Holmes about this once, and he described how he’d been inspired to write it while overhearing a TV cooking show while he was working. The song is scary precisely because it’s so peppy and oblivious to the horror it describes.
4. Gavin Bryars, The Sinking of the Titanic. Bryars writes that he created this as “the musical equivalent of a work of conceptual art.” Taking off from the legend of the band on the Titanic continuing to play as the ship sank, you hear music slowly and excruciatingly being overwhelmed by water. It’s the suspense that kills you.
5. Saint-Saens’ Danse Macabre is still the music of choice when you want to speed up the pace of a creepshow rather than deaden it. There’ve been several cartoon versions (though Disney’s Silly Symphonies “Skeleton Dance,” contrary to popular belief, is not Saint-Saens but an original Carl Stallings score.) Picasso inserted it into his play Desire Caught by the Tail. It’s a swirling beast that always overtakes you.