10 Songs Scientifically Proven To Destroy Your Mood
It’s been said that sad songs are nature’s onions, but that’s simply not true. Sad songs don’t taste great on a hamburger. But the comparison mostly holds up otherwise -- mournful music will infect your soul and pulverize any happiness to be found therein. It’s usually best to avoid the following jams, but in the event that you need a good hard cry, here are ten tracks so tragic they’d make a unicorn tear up. (Click on the song title to purchase through iTunes.)
10. Bloc Party -- “Blue Light“
Bloc Party’s entire first record, Silent Alarm, is an exciting bummer: it’s downbeat but electrifying, dark thoughts set to fast tempos and accentuated with jagged interlocking riffs. (The weirdly hyper-critical response to their output since then is also sort of a bummer, but that’s a different blog for a different day.) “Blue Light” is where they slow things down and get plaintive -- there’s no anger here, just low-burning melancholy and frontman Kele Okereke’s beautifully hushed vocals.
9. Hot Hot Heat -- “Happiness LTD“
Hot Hot Heat are one of the last bands you’d look to for introspection or depth -- they’re a bunch of goofy Canadians that specialize in keyboard-driven pop-punk that’s like Elvis Costello on a steady diet of Ritalin and Green Day. But the title track from their 2007 album Happiness LTD is an exuberant downer that dares to scratch beneath the surface and plumb some genuine emotion out of what was obviously a real, extremely traumatic break-up. This is a must-hear for anyone that ever got their heart ripped out and then shat upon; it’s so good it almost makes total misery seem worth the trouble.
8. Rilo Kiley -- “A Man/Me/Then Jim“
Rilo Kiley spent their first two records perfecting a very particular indie-folk sound; on their third, More Adventurous, they stretched out and showcased a streamlined formula that allowed for real depth and some very interesting songwriting choices. “A Man/Me/Then Jim” tells not one, not two, but three separate-but-intertwined stories, and each is a perfectly realized masterpiece of small, telling details. And they’re all heartbreaking. A lot of people were amazed by Jenny Lewis’s (admittedly amazing) solo debut, but most of the groundwork had already been laid with songs like this. Absolutely essential for fans of literate, melodic pop.
7. Elliott Smith -- “Miss Misery“
For all of his melodic genius, Elliott Smith wasted a lot of energy on bitter recrimination and angry finger-pointing. But there’s none of that on “Miss Misery,” which was featured in Good Will Hunting and eventually got nominated for an Academy Award. It’s a subtly devastating examination of post-breakup turmoil -- Smith drowns his sorrows in Johnny Walker Red, gets his fortune told at the park, and watches too much TV late at night. This is the perfect soundtrack to spending a few weeks in bed and feeling extremely sorry for yourself.
6. Blue Oyster Cult -- “(Don’t Fear) The Reaper“
“(Don’t Fear) The Reaper,” with its Shakespearean overtones and sorrowful central riff, isn’t sad so much as downright tragic; every time I hear it (which is about a dozen times a week, on a good week) I feel a little bit worse about eventually dying. For a bunch of guys that looked like downmarket porn stars and weren’t above writing a song about Godzilla, they pulled off some of the sweetest, most purely listenable rock songs of all time. “(Don’t Fear) The Reaper” never gets old; it lopes along on liquid guitar lines before briefly pausing to explode into some seriously geeky organ-blast overload. It’s music for Romantic-minded nerds that fixate on death and unrequited love because it hurts less than dwelling on getting picked last for softball in gym class.
5. Jets To Brazil -- “I Typed For Miles“
Jawbreaker / Jets to Brazil frontman Blake Schwarzenbach shamelessly swiped the main guitar riff from Nirvana’s “Heart Shaped Box” for this ode to suicide, low self-esteem, and the compulsion to obsessively mythologize one’s own pain. But he does something fresh with those super-familiar notes, and the depths of despair he reaches by track’s end (whereupon he screams, repeatedly, “You keep fucking up my life!”) are nearly unheard-of in the fake-sadness emo landscape. This is real pain, raw and unfiltered, which makes it perfectly fitting that Kurt Cobain provided essential inspiration. This one’s so brutal I don’t even recommend it, but one day you might need it just the same.
4. Motion City Soundtrack -- “Last Night“
Motion City Soundtrack specialize in transforming heartbreak to hard-won catharsis; frontman Justin Pierre is like Optimus Prime with fewer moving parts. But “Last Night” (from the band’s thoroughly defeated third album, Even If It Kills Me) doesn’t have a happy ending. Forsaking his usual mix of self-deprecation and scabrous humor, Pierre plays it completely straight as he deconstructs the end of a relationship in wide-eyed, excruciating detail while somehow steering clear of self-pity or melodrama. He’s not pathetic -- he’s vulnerable.
3. The Knife -- “Heartbeats (Live)“
The original studio version of “Heartbeats” is a slightly downbeat banger that skirts heartache but emerges victorious and mostly unscathed; the live version, however, slows the tempo and downplays the oversize synth riffs in favor of a quietly pulsing beat and skeletal melody. This would never fly in the club but it’s absofruitly perfect for sitting in your darkened bedroom and crying into a glass of wine. On record the Knife sound otherworldly and incredibly foreign; live, their humanity is front-and-center, and that’s what elevates this version of “Heartbeats” to stone-cold-classic status.
2. Alkaline Trio -- “Blue In The Face“
Cocaine is a hell of a drug.
1. Metallica -- “One“
Grabbing ideas from the Dalton Trumbo novel Johnny Got His Gun (and film adaptation of the same), Metallica designed their first single as the ultimate misery-delivery system. Kirk Hammett’s delicate, slightly wah-wah’ed guitar lines convey the bottomless sadness of war while James Hetfield tries to actually sing for a few minutes, and then the track explodes into the closest aural equivalent of total holocaust that you’ll ever hear. This is especially disturbing if you’re extremely stoned.
So -- now that you’re good and emotionally devastated, why don’t you head over to the Assault store and pick out a few happy-making t-shirts? There’s nothing like some old-fashioned retail therapy to cure your blues!
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I am the Beast, and the Beastmaster. Send me a letter
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Love the description to “Blue in the Face” hahaha! I’m Rick James, bitch!!!
lol@1 no self respecting music listener listens to Metallica anymore.
False. I listen to Metallica, and I respect myself.
That was easy.
I second that. I also have great respect for myself, a dangerous amount of respect even.
PS: 50 diggs and no retweets? People don’t like sharing stuff with their internet friends like I do.
[...] It’s been said that sad songs are nature’s onions, but that’s simply not true. Sad songs don’t taste great on a hamburger. But the comparison mostly holds up otherwise — mournful music will infect your soul and pulverize any happiness to be found therein. It’s usually best to avoid the following jams, but in the event that you need a good hard cry, here are ten tracks so tragic they’d make a unicorn tear up. (Click on the song title to purchase through iTunes.) Read ahead [...]