This is based on opinion. Please don't list it on a work's trope example list.
King Crimson are often characterized by critics as one of the darkest, most imposing
Progressive Rock groups out there, and are said to have taken their name from
Satan himself, as a metaphor for his infernal energy. Though one wonders if the name was chosen for
another of his aspects.
- If there was ever a sure sign that King Crimson was ripe for nightmarish music, it would be right at the beginning with In the Court of the Crimson King, starting with that goddamn album cover.
- "21st Century Schizoid Man" from that album lives up to its title, with its screaming guitars and saxes and apocalyptic lyrics:
Blood rack, barbed wire
Politicians' funeral pyre
21st Century Schizoid Man
- Not to mention that in the original version, and in many live versions, the vocalist is singing through a fuzzbox. The version on Earthbound sung by Boz Burrell has an especially frightening vocal effect enhancing an already far more aggressive performance than the studio version.
- The title track is no slouch either, with impressionistic dark fantasy lyrics over an unsettling sparse musical backing...
The keeper of the city keys put shutters on the dreams
I wait outside the pilgrim's door with insufficient schemes
The Black Queen chants the funeral march
The cracked brass bells will ring
To summon back the Fire Witch
To the court of the Crimson King
- From In the Wake of Poseidon we have "The Devil's Triangle", which starts off as a modest variation of Gustav Holst's "Mars, the Bringer of War", but by the end, it sounds like Mars is armed with nukes. And just to be a little more unsettling, an excerpt from "The Court of the Crimson King" swoons in and out in the final minute...
- Lizard:
- The dissonant intro to "Cirkus" can be very unsettling.
- The second half of the "Lizard" suite, starting out as a quiet ballad that slowly grows increasingly ominous and Gordon Haskell sounding increasingly pissed as the section comes to a close, which then explodes into a suffocating cacophony of horns, keyboards and guitar. And it all closes with a creepy funeral march with Fripp's weeping guitar....followed by the sounds of a carnival spiralling out of control.
- The live version of "Groon" from Earthbound features a heaping ton of dissonance, capped off by a drum solo from Ian Wallace being manipulated into a wall of pure sound through the use of a VCS3
. It seems to go on forever, and is predictably terrifying. The inferior sound quality of the album only makes it worse. - "Easy Money" ends with a creepy-sounding Evil Laugh (probably made by a toy laughing machine) which then segues into the sound of high winds with weird animal noises, followed by the very, very slow fade-in of "The Talking Drum".
- Starless and Bible Black has its share of really creepy instrumentals, such as the title track and "Fracture". "The Mincer" started out as a creepy instrumental, but then the band added strange vocals that made it even creepier.
- Most, if not the entirety of Red:
- The ominous "Red" itself follows Crimson's standard for nightmarish instrumentals, particularly in the middle section with the creepy cello, and the distorted guitar and bass which sets the tone for the entire album.
- Then there's "Providence", which is one of the most unnerving pieces of music ever to grace human ears. The first half alone will have you looking around the room, convinced that something is staring at you. It's fucking terrifying.
- Finally, there's "Starless", whose intro alone can suck the warmth out of any room with its Mellotron intro and creepy lyrics which seems to be about someone crossing the Despair Event Horizon, and even though the listener is taken to the heavens at the end of the song, the same intro is played one more time, only with a sharper, more menacing edge.
- Musicologist Eric Tamm, who wrote a book about Fripp, described "Starless" as the band's greatest achievement, the only song of theirs that had the "weight and power of tragedy", such that it regularly made him cry when he listened to it.
- Discipline:
- The song "Indiscipline" is a very heavy song with quiet parts and with a spoken word part by Adrian Belew. The original recording is not too impressive, but live versions extend it out to 8 or 9 minutes, lengthen the quiet parts to absurdly tension-building levels, and have Belew's narration take on a psychotic quality, until the song crashes into the noisy section. The full effect is terrifying.
- "Thela Hun Ginjeet" features real, covertly-recorded audio of Belew recounting an incident just minutes earlier where he'd been confronted by some guys in the street who indignantly asked him what he was doing walking around talking into a tape recorder. He's audibly freaked out by the experience, speaking frantically and bursting into stress-related laughter throughout the story. Between that, the frantic music, and how Belew's situation in the story just seemed to be getting worse and worse no matter what he did, the song makes for a chilling portrait of urban life's hidden danger. ...Or, at any rate, Adrian Belew's nervousness at being cornered in an alleyway in a strange city (London).
- "Requiem" from Beat is built around a minor-key bass ostinato with the other instruments entering one by one over the top, slowly turning into a full-blown industrial cacophony of shrieking guitars and battering drums before dying away into the sad little bass line. It's like someone having a nervous breakdown at a funeral.
- Three of a Perfect Pair:
- The Right Side opener, "Industry". It's the quiet parts of "Indiscipline" with the heavy bits removed, the lyrics removed, machine noises added, and the tension taken to an absurd level where the entire song constantly sounds like it's about to collapse on itself. This goes on for seven minutes straight.
- "Sleepless", with its twitchy, crazed bassline, creepy guitar sounds, droning synths and Belew's impressionistic rambling about fear, nightmares, the "rumbling in your ears". Also counts as Paranoia Fuel, as well. "It's alright to feel a little fear", indeed. What's more, the lyrics were actually inspired by Belew's experience during the recording sessions— the house where they were staying in was old, and Belew had trouble sleeping, having weird dreams, and even thought the house was haunted.
- Live improvisations frequently turn into cases of this (though there are exceptions such as "Trio"), due to the band's love of dissonance in these pieces. Several have been listed above with "Starless and Bible Black" and "Providence"; the 1973-1974 era in particular had quite a lot more of this that didn't make it onto their studio albums. The Great Deceiver and The Night Watch were probably the first tastes the public got of just how deep the rabbit hole went, and then the gigantic boxes The Road to Red, Starless, and the Larks' Tongues in Aspic anniversary box provided even more of it.
- Fripp's 1979 debut solo album Exposure also contained ample amounts of horror, the most conspicuous example being the track "NY3". Originally this was a churning heavy rock thrash with a vocal by Daryl Hall called "New York, New York, New York", but when contractual issues meant that Fripp had to remove a lot of Hall's performances from the album, he replaced the vocal with bits of a recording he'd made of his next-door neighbours in NYC, a father, a mother and an adult daughter, having a vicious family argument.note He noted in an interview that the snippet on the recording was only a few second of it: apparently it went on like that for about an hour and a half before he even started recording. Most of the versions of the songs with Hall on them finally showed up decades later in a 2006 two-disc version which contained both the originally-released version of the album, and as much as he could release of the original conception of it.
