Prompt: "A song that frightens you"
Selected by Gilson
"Prayer to God"
Shellac
1000 Hurts, 2000
This is a tough one to find on any streaming service. It's one of the handful of bands that famed producer* Steve Albini played in. There are some cover versions, including a decent acoustic cover by Frank Turner, but none of them come anywhere close to expressing the terror and dread that pervades this recording.
I think in the prompt I wrote about a song that creeps you out, I mentioned how songs don't generally scare me, but the first time I heard this, I was gobsmacked. The dissonance of the guitar combined with the lack of polish on the vocals makes it sound particularly unhinged before even getting to the lyrics. If you have not heard this song before, I urge you to clear a little time and listen while focusing on just the song.
*Albini rather famously (pretentiously? I like Albini) used to prefer that in album credits he was not given a credit of "Produced By" but rather "Recorded By" because he didn't really do many overdubs or fancy stuff. The prototypical Albini recording attitude, to me, is In Utero by Nirvana.
1 comment:
I'm so bad at reading puns in print, and I don't think I would've gotten the one in the album title if the intro to this song didn't say it out loud.
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