California Sounds: Hear 13 Los Angeles songs that’ll scare the bejesus out of you

As with life itself, there exists in music a dark side, a realm where grim themes swirl through musical notation as if bats through catacombs.

For every “Walking on Sunshine” there is a “Hell Awaits.” Judy Garland might wonder on the heaven that lives “Over the Rainbow,” but be careful not to fall into Johnny Cash’s “Ring of Fire” along the way.

Despite L.A.’s lack of dark and stormy nights, the city is a master of disguises and, as sure as it can transform Nicolas Cage into a bankable star, has been known to conjure thunder-cracking evil on command.

Below, a special Halloween edition of California Sounds: Thirteen grim songs from the city’s cabinet of horrors.

Kendrick Lamar, “Blood” (2017). The eerie opening song of the Compton rapper’s album “Damn” suggests the first scene of a horror movie. Vocalist Bekon opens with a four-line soliloquy: “Is it wickedness? Is it weakness? You decide. Are we gonna live or die?” We’re introduced to a seemingly helpless blind woman pacing a Compton sidewalk. As Lamar approaches to help (spoiler alert!), she kills him.

Julia Holter, “Horns Surrounding Me” (2017). Are they devil or goat horns? Maybe Hyundai or Audi horns? It’s hard to tell, but the eerie textures, including the sounds of muffled footprints, suggest a grim walk through a moonlit graveyard.

Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross, “Halloween” (2017). This just-issued cover of the theme to John Carpenter’s classic horror film, by film composing collaborators Reznor and Ross, honors one of the grimmest works in the canon.

Chicano Batman, “Black Lipstick” (2015). This snapshot of an undead goth woman whose blood turns from red to blue and will likely “swindle your heart” comes with a warning. Like a zombie from “The Walking Dead,” she’ll remove your blood-pumper and “she’ll tear it apart (she’ll tear it, she’ll tear it apart).”

Off!, “You Must Be Damned” (2014). As if deemed so by Beelzebub himself, punk singer Keith Morris rages in support of eternal fire. “Into the flame to lose the fight! I see something I don’t like!”

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Gnarls Barkley, “The Boogie Monster” (2006). Best known for its smash, “Crazy,” the team of Danger Mouse and CeeLo Green warned of this titular monster on the same album. The boogie monster “waits till the midnight hour to come/To torture me for the wrong that I’ve done.”

Queens of the Stone Age, “Song for the Dead” (2002). When singer Mark Lanegan details a night “late enough to go driving and see what’s mine” he might be the Grim Reaper looking for souls. Featuring an overturned hearse and an empty noose, the song’s unanswered questions make it doubly scary.

Aimee Mann, “Frankenstein” (1995). “It’s rare that you ever know what to expect/From a guy made of corpses with bolts in his neck,” explains Mann in her song about the expectations that arrive with new love. “If the creature is limping, the parts are in place/With a mind of its own and a fist for a face.”

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Sparks, “The Ghost of Liberace” (1994). In which the brothers Ron and Russell Mael document a town’s encounter with the late entertainer’s spirit, who “hums ‘Evita’ and ‘Moon River’ and ‘Michelle’/Maybe that’s why the people scream out ‘Go to hell.’”

Megadeth, “Lucretia” (1990). Screaming leader Dave Mustaine samples a cackling witch to open this creepy headbanger. “I stalk the cobwebbed stairways — dirt grits beneath my feet,” he wails. Mustaine’s in an attic where “Lucretia waits impatiently, cobwebs make me squint” and “moonbeams surge through the sky — the crystal ball is energized!”

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Dream Syndicate, “Halloween” (1982). The centerpiece of the early ’80s band’s “The Days of Wine & Roses” is set in “a place you might wanna go.” As tangled, Neil Young-suggestive electric guitar lines wail, singer Steve Wynn describes a spot where “you might look and see the light shining.” What’s there? Halloween.

The Doors, “Peace Frog” (1970). Jim Morrison and band may have been focused on the bloody politics of the late 1960s when he sang about “blood in the streets” up to his ankles, but the images are haunting across the song: “Blood stains the roofs and the palm trees of Venice/ Blood in my love in the terrible summer/ Bloody red sun of Phantastic L.A./ Blood screams her brain as they chop off her fingers.”

Johnny Otis, “Castin’ My Spell” (1959). In this uptempo R&B rocker, the late L.A. icon describes his recipe for keeping his woman around. The ingredients include a black cat, a cave bat, a ghost tooth, an old shoe, an old dish, a dried fish, a goose egg and a frog leg. (A bouquet of roses every now and then wouldn’t hurt.)

For tips, records, snapshots and stories on Los Angeles music culture, follow Randall Roberts on Twitter and Instagram: @liledit. Email: randall.roberts@latimes.com.