Brainiac: "Strung"

This song is one of the creepiest ever made… spooky, too, and many other cobwebbed adjectives, and the reason lies in its brevity, its opacity, its formlessness. Bass down-strokes plod along unevenly, providing the only sort of anchor to the droning, dying synth arrangement, and it’s an anchor not to be trusted. Timmy Taylor’s high, off-key vocals follow along with hesitations, wide eyes, stumbling forward and forgetting to look for whatever horror sits behind. But scarier than his predicament is the completely foreign, unintelligible nature of his whispers. A multi-tracked chorus starts the song with what might be, “I’ve got room for a date / Don’t you, try to, escape.” From there on it’s holes and question marks, snippets of “watch the tape of you” and “don’t try to pray” breaking through the murk until a two-note bass refrain interrupts the verse. Timmy’s murmur picks up again, the chorus returns, all eerie halo, and then the songs ends with that one moment of musical resolve, the two-note bass swallow. And the only thing clear is that Taylor is both predator and victim.

The inky black territory that this song explores has been further chartered by Brainiac offspring Enon in songs like “Cruel” and “Believo,” by Radiohead in the string of albums that started with OK Computer the year after Hissing Prigs, and most recently by Thee More Shallows with “2am.” However, “Strung” surpasses all of these successors in terms of mystery. It is full to overflowing with the unknown; its progeny, too uncomfortable with the blanks, provide more definition to the music and lyrics. They add processed beats or a crystalline mix-down. “Strung” is all fuzz and echo and muffling walls, an M.O. that the band Iran knows well but applies to ditties that are less alien at heart. So, “Strung” is a cold-nerve experience that’s quite singular, small in execution but immeasurable in implication. Even in life, Timmy Taylor’s ghost haunted his music.