The Advantage is the most renowned and celebrated of a surprisingly vibrant scene of video game bands. Capcom’s Ghosts N’ Goblins for Nintendo was true nerd nirvana when it came to ghost-centric video games it was so difficult that you had to beat the thing twice in order to really win. Of all the ways that ghosts have invaded our consciousness in popular culture, those little fellows who chase you in Pac-Man must surely be near the top.
It’s a love/hate ode to a femme fatale: “You thought winning as a woman meant failing as a friend/ It is not an art statement to drown a few passionate men.” Far from mere rock-and-roll misogyny, the song is an apex of the kind of literate punk at which LA acts excelled (see also X, Flesh Eaters and the Germs).
And - to speak in the manner of a high school English lit student - in this song we see the image of the ghost used as a metaphor for a love interest. The Gun Club’s lead singer/ songwriter Jeffrey Lee Pierce combined a slashing brand of punk-blues with noir-tinged poetry. It finally reels back in on itself, and Ayler once again repeats that same opening melodic motif. This song, for instance, begins with a nursery rhyme-ish melody before evolving into a mournful - and occasionally crazed - dirge. In his lifetime, he forged a strangely transcendent sound that mixed both visceral and spiritual sounds to stunning effect. No one knows the story of his death, though he presumably killed himself.
Haunting songs like ghost on the shore free#
Surely Albert Ayler is himself a ghost, then? The great free jazz tenor saxophone player was found floating face down in New York’s East River in late 1970. The general lore around ghosts is that they are uneasy spirits - suicides, the cuckolded and the murdered all become ghosts when they die. Albert Ayler, “Prophecy: Ghosts (First Variation)” In the context of the album, when Mangum sings “I know that she will live forever, she won’t ever die” it’s truly a cathartic release - made all the more so by Scott Spillane’s Eastern European horn arrangements, Julian Koster’s singing saw and Mangum’s own fuzzed-up guitar.Ģ.
But, Mangum told me, as the album progressed and began to take a greater focus on the Holocaust, “the song became more of a reference to Anne Frank.” It’s an oblique reference, peppered with flowery, surreal imagery, but that’s the dude’s style. Singer Jeff Mangum started to write this song about a ghost that was living in the bathroom of his house. This is the ninth song on In the Aeroplane Over the Sea, that remarkable indie-rock album recently voted the Best Album on eMusic. But here is a list of some of the better ones out there, for anyone who would like to make the ultimate haunted mix. There are so many songs about ghosts and hauntings that it would take me forever to list them all.
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