Nightmare Fuel / Coil

• "Queens of the Circulating Library", a nearly fifty-minute track mostly composed of resonant drones, goes into this territory about halfway through, with a spoken-word piece that ends up invoking Nothing Is Scarier.
• Their side-project Zos Kia has the song "Rape", inspired by personal experience, specifically that of their vocalist. It becomes very intense very quickly.
  • "Poisons" isn't any easier to listen to either.
• In a similar vein, "The Tenderness of Wolves", if only due to the looping infant screams.
  • From the same album, "Panic," with its frenetic backbeat and lyrics that seem to alternate between False Reassurance and Madness Mantra, to the point where the lines begin to blur. "The only thing to fear is fear itself" has never sounded less reassuring...
• The entirety of Horse Rotorvator is a masterpiece of musical Nightmare Fuel from start to finish.
  • "The Anal Staircase" opens with the discordant vocals of John Balance singing about angels tearing each other apart in ecstasy above samples of laughing children.
  • "Blood from the Air", especially the tape solo. That, and the lyrics, which pretty much about detailed Scenery Gorn.
  • "Circles of Mania," which sees Jhonn ecstatically hamming his way through Word Salad Lyrics which mercilessly kludge together eroticism, violence, nihilism, and Roman history.
  • The crown jewel, however, may be "Ostia (The Death Of Pasolini). Balance's Dull Surprise works in conveying a worthlessness to life accented by the work and mysterious murder of the titular Italian director.
    • Killed to keep the world turning, killed to keep the world turning...
• The Music to Play in the Dark duology, which manages to keep up a consistently unsettling atmosphere throughout.
• "It's in My Blood," primarily due to its shrieked, blabbering vocals and the dramatic orchestra playing in- and out-of-time with the already ominous beat.
• "Things Happen." First we have Jhonn's distorted shouting, then Annie Anxiety's sultry-voiced spoken word, loaded with creepy innuendo and implication, all to a rather tense melody.
• One of their albums, Constant Shallowness Leads to Evil is full of nightmare fuel. "Higher Beings Command" is a bitcrushed noise jam, "I Am the Green Child" is a distorted, psychedelic singalong, and the "Tunnel of Goats" set is pure, warped noise, along with phased vocals by Jhonn.
• Their cover of "Tainted Love", which massively slows down the bouncy mood of the original into an aching funeral dirge, with jarringly loud and distorted piano chords punctuating every lyric. The unbelievably bleak music video, depicting a man slowly succumbing to AIDS and Dying Alone (plus lots of sudden flashes of miscellaneous disturbing images), is almost unbearable to watch.

---