Halloween Guide Nasty, brutish, and short: A Madison mixtape for Halloween and beyond

Fall is a time to stare longingly at your radiator. Time to put on insane costumes for inscrutable reasons. Time to slaughter animals. Also time to put away all those gauzy, blissed-out, acid-wash, lo-fi LP's you've been drinking beers to on the porch for the last four months move and on to the harder stuff while you get intimate with the inside of your spooky gothic mansion (or one-room studio) while everyone quietly loses their shit for the next six months. Because it's not getting any lighter or warmer for a good long time, The A.V. Club offers this mix of tracks from a few Madison acts inclined to lurk in the icy shadows.

Burial Hex, "Go Crystal Tears"
"Go Crystal Tears" by Burial Hex

The A.V. Club is pretty certain that Burial Hex (one-man power-noise machine Clay Ruby) is not merely trying to kill listeners with his music—he's also attempting to summon indescribable evil from the depths of space-hell to destroy the world. Burial Hex is grounded in seriously heavy horror electronics, analog synth, epic noise, dragging chains, otherworldly yowling, and occasionally video art. On "Go Crystal Tears," from Burial Hex's recent split release with fellow local act Zola Jesus, the synth, noise, plinking piano chords chug along in sort of an austere march, under maniacal screams likely to ring out in your skull until the merciful thaw arrives.

Caustic, "Bacia La Capra"
"Bacia La Capra" by Caustic

Somewhere between power-violence and dark electro-disco, Caustic makes listeners question if there's really that big of a difference between violence and disco. Matt Fanale can be caught pretty often at the Inferno banging out spooky chugging beats and heavily affected, screamed vocals. "Bacia La Capra" is a perfect juxtaposition of heavy beats and dialogue sampled from God knows what Christian educational video, perhaps borrowing a page from DJ Shadow's playbook (see "Devil's Advocate"). Caustic then layers on crunchy vocals reminiscent of Street Fighter 2 sound effects and other atmospheric noise until the track comes to a head with the obligatory echoing maniacal laugh. Even when the holiday doesn't call for lasers, dancing, and leather, this song does.

Zola Jesus, "Sea Talk"
"Sea Talk" by Zola Jesus

Nika Danilova of Zola Jesus has the stage presence of someone possessed, which is a good thing for our purposes here. Songs like "Sea Talk" are a cross between serious vocal pieces and mind-bending washes of noise. This track at once hints at the feeling of a loved-and-lost pop song and the feeling of waking up and realizing you've been buried alive.

GlassGhosts, "The Body Found"
"The Body Found" by GlassGhosts

GlassGhosts is a local act that should be seen and not heard, yet this might provide some weird comfort for those too demoralized to throw on a pelt and travel from the cave to the club. Gothic electro-disco is at the musical heart of this act, but GlassGhosts also offers a generous dose of post-apocalyptic performance art. If the band members and their gas-masked gimp companions don't frighten you, the experience will at least confuse you. Either way, the beats are for dancing—and few things are more frightening to Midwesterners than getting a little footloose.

Spires That In The Sunset Rise, "Party Favors"
"Party Favors" by Spires That In The Sunset Rise

Spires' magical folk seems to get the adjective 'witchy' stuck to it pretty often. Indeed, it takes some conjuring to make a freaking banjo sound as ominous and creepy as it does in the intro to "Party Favors." The slow plucking lets on that something terrible is about to happen, and the vocals only maintain that feeling.