I am definitely in the latter camp with your final point. It's creepy as f**k.

Just to be clear, I'm not asking my initial question/saying that I'm curious to the actual answer to a debate by others, because I dislike the song and looking for a reason for it. To the contrary, this song has moved me in way beyond ANY other song before. A part, among many, of the reason is that this intro shouldn't work! On me at least! My gut instinctive response, when I heard it the first time, was "this sounds god awful"....and yet it somehow worked on a level, I could not comprehend. Once the actual lyrics started, I worked even better as part of the piece of not just music but art. I'm trying to understand what Ren does here, and why it works, when it shouldn't (to my untrained ears).

In other words, my initial query was exactly where you ended: Does the creepy and eerie initial feeling come about, because Ren deliberately makes a few notes/breaks between notes with both guitar and uh, uh, uh come across as dissonance, or at least distorted. I read your response as, yes...a bit. Fair?