With summer moving towards fall, and the greatest and creepiest holiday of the year now less than two months away, I thought I’d take a break from flogging the careers of bastards, and move onto another subject near and dear to my heart: Songs that unintentionally give one the creeps.

I’m sure if you’re like me, you have at least one childhood memory of sitting in a dark room listening to the radio. Suddenly, a song comes on that’s so weird, so dark, so strange, that you rush to turn the lights on and the radio off at the same time, for fear of losing your mind — or to ward off the beasts of hell that surely lurk within the song.

Of course, the song in question might be something by Gordon Lightfoot — but dammit, back then it was freakin’ scary, so lay off, man!

Anyway, these next few weeks, leading up to Halloween, I’m going to be giving you some of the most unintentionally creepy compositions that have burned themselves into my brain. I’d love you to use the comments sections to tell me about some of your own that you think I should cover.

So, let’s start things off with a bang — or a crash, if you’re talking about this group’s most popular song. The Shangri-Las might pack the most per-capita creepiness into their career than any other pop group (or at least girl group). Riding the early-’60s wave of both girl groups and teenager tragedy songs, the Shangri-Las’ first hit, “Remember (Walking in the Sand)”, provided a template for the rest of their career, using all the elements that would make them memorable: spoken lyrics, sound effects, and melodrama so rich it bordered on camp. These were mixed together with echo-drenched vocals that varied between emotive belts one second and almost zombie-like monotones the next, and all of it was produced via a dime-store recreation of Phil Spector’s Wall of Sound courtesy of Brill Building oddball George “Shadow” Morton (so nicknamed because he had the habit of often disappearing for days without telling anyone where he was going). (more…)