Nightmare Fuel / Avenged Sevenfold

Sure, we know Avenged Sevenfold as a badass metal band. But they have a lot of chilling moments in their music, more than you may think.

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Waking the Fallen

• The once-cut music video for "Unholy Confessions" isn't too off-putting on it's own, but there are a few moments where M. Shadows lets out screams, and you get a very nice close up of his face. His face looks fucking evil during these short segments.

City of Evil

• The end of "Blinded in Chains" has a slower tempo and has Shadows speak in a very low and off-putting voice singing about being blind to the death happening around everyone.

  Look at the way we're dying, one by one

  How it ends, I'll never know

  Just live your life blind like me..

• The music video for "Beast and the Harlot" is mostly full of the band playing with a party going on. However, when no one's watching, there's some sort of.. Thing, that's turning people into ink-black.. People? Which look very uncanny.
• "Bat Country"'s music video gets very surreal around the second half of the video. It makes you feel like you're undergoing a Mushroom Samba as parts of people's faces get bigger and strange things happen like Syn guitarring on a bathtub with an amount of tentacles in there for some reason.

Avenged Sevenfold

• "A Little Piece of Heaven" is 8 minutes of a couple being in love with each other's dead selves, and quite literally loving each other to death. Though this may count more as a Bizarro Episode if the underlying theme and its relation to the other songs of the Self-Titled Album is to be taken in context.

Nightmare

• Unsurprisingly, the "Nightmare" video. Said video includes children playing in blood, a catatonic Syn Gates banging his bloodied head against a window, Matt's slow Sanity Slippage through a hospital, Zack dancing with a skeleton and the ending Wham Shot being that the surgery room containing The Rev's drum set, with the lights morphed into his form.
• "Buried Alive" is about dying and basically enduring hell for your actions. The main character's skin starts peeling away by the end, and he turns out to possibly be a worse person than he was before.
• "Natural Born Killer" lives up to it's name by being about a mass murderer who uses press coverage to his advantage.
• The Harsh Vocals of the olden days return in "God Hates Us", a full blown Rage Against the Heavens with a person who's pissed off with God for not responding to our wishes.
• "Fiction" is about The Rev dying and moving on into the afterlife. The piano melody that plays throughout the song, along with the lyrics, are very chilling. Particularly the last thirty seconds or so, which is basically a passage of eerie near-silence.

  Not that I could,

  Or that I would,

  Let it burn,

  Under my skin,

  Let it BUUUUUUUUUUURRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRN

The Stage

• At first, "Simulation" seems like yet another soft song from The Stage, but then the first verse ends and you hear people talking about how they only let humans exist because they allow it. The whole song is about how reality is possibly a simulation. The bits before each chorus border the line between cheesiness and actual horror. The bridge is about a full minute of the stuff, and there's little Narm to be found.

Life Is But a Dream...

• Life Is But a Dream... is one of the band's darkest albums ever. The themes of existentialism combined with the ever-changing nature of the sound makes for a challenging listen. In particular, the many uses of Mood Whiplash are very off-putting. From "Game Over" going from a soft soothing atmosphere to heavy sound just to do it again, to "We Love You" going from a dream-like chorus to a very loud cameo from some Harsh Vocals, it's all done in a way that is disturbing to hear, especially for a first time listener. The idea of false hope seems to also be a prevalent idea discussing the sound. A few of the darker songs have an upbeat sounding synth that gives off a Crapsaccharine World energy. "Mattel", "Cosmic", and "(O)rdinary" are some examples. It's not really as much of a few Hope Spots as it is sarcastic. It's like shallowness and insult, passed off as hope.
• "Game Over" is about a person committing suicide. The song goes from a gentle and homely intro to a very fast verse as the singer recalls what happened in the day. About halfway through it becomes gentle again as he starts contemplating suicide. The outro has the speedy nature of the verses playing one last time as he throws a rope over a tree and hangs himself.

  Toss a rope over the branch and fall into the night

  And here I swing from my family tree, say goodnight

  Can't you see, life is but a dream anyway...

• "Mattel" is an analogy of the world we live in using statements about a toy world made out of plasticity, rapid consumerism, days that repeat, and false hope, where nobody is in control of their life. In particular is the part around the final chorus. The drums losing speed, the choir-like voices, and the song losing it's speed by the end. It's a very jarring ending. The music video features a Barbie doll partaking in a repeating day in hell, and is very surreal.
• "Beautiful Morning" is about the duality of beauty and nihilism. The chorus seems to represent more themes of being no different than anybody else who lives or dies. Soundwise, it's the musical personification of dread.
• "(D)eath" is (mostly) done in the style of soft jazz, which, at first, perhaps stands as the only time the "false hope" sound of the album is legitimate hope. And then you find out it's about someone jumping off of a building and killing himself. The outro is particularly gut-wrenching, as the jazz in the background grows louder, signifying the end of the singer's life.
• Wes Lang's depiction of the Deathbat is surprisingly nightmarish. The minimalist style most Life Is But a Dream... art is done with is abandoned for a pretty detailed look of the Deathbat, even more so than usual. It's jaw looks ready to swallow something whole, and given the art style, it looks like there's ink dripping off of it. There is ink dripping off of it as seen in the audio visualizers for the album's songs. All in all, a creepy rendition of the usually badass looking Deathbat.

Unsorted

• "Not Ready to Die," a song written for Black Ops Zombies, is sung from the point of view of Samantha/the zombies...

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