When John Lennon started recording outside The Beatles catalogue, his solo output was more personal and, as a result, sometimes sounded a lot creepier too.
Unfinished Music No. 1: Two Virgins (1968)
- Turn out the lights and listen to "Two Virgins". The album is a terrifying playlist of disjointed noises, shouts, and clatterings brought about by John and Yoko stumbling around John's homebrew recording studio (actually just an assortment of tape decks) in the middle of the night. You could be forgiven for thinking it's the audio from a horror movie... unless you're a sound collage devotee, in which case you're probably laughing all over the floor. These two were Negativland before there was Negativland!
Unfinished Music No. 2: Life with the Lions (1969)
- The album begins with Yoko's announcement: "This is a piece called Cambridge # 1969". Then she provides a Jump Scare by starting to scream for a very long time!
- "Baby's Heartbeat". A heartbeat monitor recording of John and Yoko's unborn child. This would be charming in a way, were it not for the fact that the child died in miscarriage, making the two minutes of silence that follow on the record all the more morbid. And this all happened before the record came out, so they could have kept this from the album. But they didn't, thus we share their pain and horror.
Wedding Album (1969)
- Some of Yoko and John's screaming during "John & Yoko" can catch you by surprise.note The real problem with this one is that it can sound Harsher in Hindsight.
John Lennon/Plastic Ono Band (1970)
- "God" has a far too bouncy tune to be a dirge and far too funereal to be a rhapsody, the piano chords have this biting quality like a wild animal snapping at you, and Lennon's vocals sound about twelve times as ghostly as they did in The Beatles' "A Day in the Life".
- "Mother" The way the song ends with Lennon's screaming getting louder and louder to the point where it sounds between a mix of inhumane and demonic. The actual ending of the song is a bit more terrifying since it just sounds like John is screaming into the damn void. Although once you find out the true meaning of the song, it just turns flat-out depressing.
- "My Mummy's Dead" is the closing track to the album, managing to pack in as much nightmare fuel as it can in under 52 seconds. It's a tinny recording of John coldly singing about the death of his mother through a childish lens... It completely doubles as TearJerker; but listen to it in the dark. It feels like you're looking into the mind of a serial killer with severe mommy issues (think Jason Voorhees) brooding in their home before the teens come and intrude on his property....
- "Remember" is a light, bouncy number until the last seconds...Remember...Remember... The fifth OF NOVEMBER--
- "I Don't Wanna Be A Soldier Mama": The song starts out relatively normally, but both the lyrics and music gradually end up becoming more disjointed, and the the song ends with weird electronic noises.
- "Cold Turkey": A song about Lennon quitting his heroin addiction. It's an uncomfortable song in which Lennon sings about feeling ill and desperate. To top it all off, the last lines are just him screaming and moaning his pain away.
