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Nightmare Fuel / Placebo

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  • "Evil Dildo," the nearly 8-minute hidden track on Without You I'm Nothing, chock full of insanely distorted guitars and actual threatening messages left on Brian's answering machine. Making it even more disturbing is the sample of Aphex Twin's "Funny Little Man" right at the end of the song - the music fades out, leaving an Apple text-to-speech voice threatening a particularly disgusting Groin Attack, looping again and again and again, until the album just abruptly ends right there. Great little tune, if you want to never, ever sleep again.
  • "Brick Shithouse," a story about a homicide, then the murderer stealing the victim's lover, all witnessed by the ghost of the victim:
    "When you cum you never make a single sound
    I'll be watching when he's around."
  • "Then the Clouds Will Open for Me" is a bonus track off the European release of Sleeping with Ghosts, featuring just the every-beat strumming of an acoustic guitar and Brian singing a somewhat unpredictable melody along his higher range. Sonically, it feels dissonant and simultaneously boxed-in and like it's constantly about to tip over and fall apart, and coupled with the cryptic and morbid lyrics, it's just eerie.
  • The band's cover of "Fuck U" by Archive takes a cool-headed, if wry as hell, electronic rock song and turns it into something slow-building and chilling. Between the violent heights it explodes into and the way Brian's vocals quake at points on it, it sounds like pure rage and hatred in musical form, and it's hard to say if it's more cathartic or frightening for it.

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