5 Terrifying tunes for Halloween

Most Halloween music is about as scary as a bed sheet ghost.

But I’m here to help you help celebrate the holiday in pantaloons-wetting style.

Forget the slasher flicks and haunted houses. If you want a truly frightful night, crank these tunes and have a fresh pair of BVDs handy.

BURMESE, “Broken Legs, Broken Face, Blood Everywhere”: These San Francisco restraining-order candidates brand themselves “noise terrorists.” This one will get under your skin like slivers of bamboo jammed beneath your fingernails with feedbacking guitars, screeching electronics and intensely enraged vocals. It’s all juxtaposed with pained whimpering, an awful sound that you may find emanating from yourself.

DIAMANDA GALAS, “The Litanies of Satan”: Galas has one of the most incredible, you-have-to-hear-it-to-believe-it voices to ever come screaming from a woman’s lungs like some agonized, flame-covered soul fleeing a burning house. Here, she seriously sounds as if she’s getting railroad spikes hammered into her kneecaps. Galas shrieks and pants and speaks in tongues, not conjuring Satan so much as sending the guy running back to the relative comfort of hell’s fires.

GODFLESH, “Streetcleaner”: I first heard “Streetcleaner” on Earache’s classic 1989 “Grindcrusher” compilation, and though Godflesh was sandwiched between standard bearers of brutality like Carcass and Entombed, it was this post-industrial duo who seemed truly extreme. Yeah, Morbid Angel may have been worshiping Satan, but it was Godflesh frontman Justin Broadrick who really sounded like him here, his voice processed into a thing of formless, inhuman menace, speaking rather than barking his words over a drum machine’s metronomic pulse and an ominous, blood-freezing electronic drone. All these years later, countless veins have yet to thaw.

PIG DESTROYER, “Jennifer”: Eyeballs get licked like sugar cubes in this truly disturbing narrative, which chronicles two girls playfully wrestling one another to the ground in front of a gathering crowd who are both confused and concerned by what they’re witnessing, but still compelled to watch. “This is disgusting,” a woman in a fur coat exclaims. “No, no, no,” a professorial-type male onlooker counters. “This is art.”

It’s both.

BETHLEHEM, “Schuld Uns’res Knoch’ringen Faltpferd”: The promise of king-size Snickers bars wrapped in $20 bills couldn’t lure trick-or-treaters to your front door should this black metal mood ruiner be blaring in the background. It’s all in the vocals, which are some of the most tortured, horrifying sounds that a larynx has ever emitted aside from “Tyler Perry presents…”

Contact reporter Jason Bracelin at jbracelin@reviewjournal.com or 702-383-0476. Follow on Twitter @JasonBracelin