People are dressed up as memes, Kevin Spacey was accused of sexual assault, Paul Manafort was indicted. Things are getting really, really spooky. Sure, 2017 has been pretty ominous in the political and pop-culture world, but add in dead trees, pumpkins, and cold weather and…I’m just plain scared.

This Rock Don’t Walk is dedicated to spooky jams that are going to make your Halloween…feel like Season 6 of American Horror Story; a little to real.

Here is a playlist to fully immerse you in the scary world that we currently live in.

“Escape” – Kyle Dixon

So yes, this is from the Stranger Things Season two soundtrack. I love the heavy synth, definitely remnicent of Daft Punk’s “TRON Legacy” Album. They embodied the 80’s perfectly and also give us an eerie start to the playlist.

“John Wayne Gacy, Jr.” – Sufjan Stevens

This song is terrifying. Flat out terrifying. This is about John Wayne Gacy, from the perspective (or so I assume), of his son, John Wayne Gacy, Jr. It’s frighteningly morbid, and there’s breathing at the end along with slow taps on the piano keys that really leave you thinking about the song long after it’s finished.

“This is Halloween” – The Citizens of Halloween

Alright you might be laughing that I transitioned to this ridiculously goofy song but I’ll be honest in saying I sing this all year long. I don’t know why, something about my messed up childhood, but it rings in my ears throughout the seasons.

“Little Dreamer” – Future Islands

The dissonance in the guitar chords that this song first brings on to the listener in its melody already creates a repetitive, synchronised pattern that draws you in.

Like the waxing scar where my lonely heart
Once bloomed before I met you

“Psycho Killer” – The Talking Heads

fa-fa-fa-faaaaar better. Sure, the topic is Psycho Killer, so it’s spooky in it’s title. But it’s also got flare through the rest of the song that can put you off. Bryne’s voice seems to kind of mutter in this song compared to the other Talking Head’s hits. He’s shaky, and it sets that theme for the rest of the music. The base is stagnant through the song, and that keeps the jaunt of the song moving forwards

“Five Minutes” – Her

The electric guitar clearly sets the mood for what kind of dissonant and strange song this is going to be, but the chorus “All I need is five minutes” actually dissolves into a kind of dream-like sequence. This song is intoxicating and off-putting – two of my favorite things.

“Stranger Things” – Kyle Dixon

you know what they say, start with a stranger thing, end with a stranger thing.

Have a happy hallows eve everyone!

The post Rock Dont Walk: It’s getting spooky. appeared first on KRUI Radio.

The National’s 7th album, Sleep Well Beast contains many of the band’s first’s; a guitar solo by Aaron Dessner on “The System Only Dreams in Total Darkness,” or the song “Turtleneck,” which Berninger explains to NPR is basically gibberish but with dark political connotation about President Donald Trump.

Electronic influences aren’t new to Sleep Well Beast, although it seems so to an audience. A bright citrus opening to the album playfully awakens this to the audience, with horse hove sounding synths while in the background, a melodramatic piano pattern carries the classic sounds we’ve been craving since their last release in 2013; Trouble Will Find Me.

“There’s some of it [electronic influence] on every record, really. You can hear beds of electronic stuff kind of rolling away in the background on the last album, on “Demons” and “Don’t Swallow the Cap” says Bryce Dessner, National guitarist and composer tells Joe Goggins.

Bursting choruses, bloody and brooding lyrics all bring together the perfect pace that Sleep Well Beast is. While still moody and dark, no doubt with help from Justin Vernon of Bon Iver, friend of Aaron Desser, there’s a new take on relationships, romantic and social, for this album.

“I’m not lost I’m not lost I’m losing grip the fabrics ripped” Berlinger grumbles in Sleep Well Beast, “let me figure it out, how to get us back to the place where we were when we first went out.”

“The [lyrics] are flexible, My marriage is in tact, but this is clearly a record about a relationship that’s over or maybe about to be over”  Berlinger tells NPR’s All Songs Considered with a chuckle. The album is centered on Berninger and his wife, Carin Besser, who co-wrote part of the album.

“We write about the things that are really really scare us the most, looking over the edge, and if you really look far enough over and address it and then come back and talk about what you saw and saying ‘I don’t want to take that step, I’m not going to do that’ that’s a healthy thing,” he tells NPR.

Sleep Well Beast isn’t an album that was put together with just chords and lyrics, it’s a socially aware active piece of art. The title of the album was born from the idea of Resignation Syndrome where, after being told they’re being deported from Sweden, hundreds of Syrian refugee children are falling into a comatose state for weeks at a time.

Berninger explains what part the election took in the album to Joe Goggins, “We had a bunch of songs that were actually quite political, but they just felt fundamentally lame and insignificant afterwards, so we dumped them. The political stuff that remains is just of a different tone.”

Aaron Dessner continues, “You can’t really separate your art from your personal experience, and everything that’s happening right now – you know, these are things that are going to affect our children.”

You can hear empathy, and the tug on Berninger’s patience in his voice through the entire album. It’s nothing that we don’t expect from the band, but it’s everything we needed to hear.

“The end of it’s a bunch of imagery from news footage that I saw, people like on forklifts..and you know native americans stopping the pipeline…and different stuff, its just fragments of imagery coming in and out at the end” Berninger tells NPR’s All Songs Considered.  

“Also the sound of the record gets a little bit deconstructed and the pieces of the architecture of the song get kind of revealed at the end…it was a big…yeah we were smoking weed, man.”

Sleep Well Beast was released September 8th, 2017.

The post Everything you need to know while you’re listening to The National’s new LP “Sleep Well Beast” appeared first on KRUI Radio.