Ten Stories
- Fox and Bear's predicament in Ten Stories. Hopelessly lost and eventually starving in the dead of winter in the Montana wilderness. They're either unable to make their way back to human civilization, or any humans they do come across will only see them as dumb animals. It gets so bad that eventally Fox ends up having to eat Bear's corpse to stay alive. Religious symbolism aside, it's still incredibly morbid.
- The Circus. A glorified prison that forces the animals to perform for the amusement of humans despite them being fully sapient creatures that are capable of speech. Peacock's reaction to being reimprisoned is essentially suicidal despair. And as shown with Julian, they're not above using taking people as captives either...
- Elephant's execution by hanging conjures up some rather nasty Surreal Horror in the mind, especially given that it's based on a real event.
- Fox's titular dream of the log flume: She sees Bear leaping to his death from an amusement park ride surrounded by howling wolves, only for his still-living corpse to grab her ankle. The meaning behind the second part is never made clear.
- The album cover itself is a surreal Guernica-esque piece depicting a group of monsters along with a decapitated corpse with its heart ripped out.
- I ADMIT IT WARMS MY HEART, TO WATCH YOUR WORLD FALL APART!
- “Blue Hen”: Death’s final threat that closes the song is a rather chilling aversion of Don't Fear the Reaper in which he promises to erase Aaron’s existence while also comforting his family in his absence like some kind of manipulative, metaphysical serial killer.
- “Magic Lantern Days” presents a Dystopia that holds a strange, worshipful reverence for nuclear bombs in spite of - or ‘’because of’’ - the devastation they’ve wreaked on the planet. The chanted, quasi-religious lyrics just make it creepier; there’s something downright ‘’eerie’’ about describing the creation of a bomb in the same manner as the Birth of Christ.
- The second part of “Rainbow Signs” is essentially a cacophonic, frantic retelling of the Book of Revelation practically *shouted* out. The band fully returns to their Post-Hardcore roots in that moment, except instead of singing about lost love, they’re detailing the Biblical End of the World as We Know It in all its horrifying glory.
- “Bethlehem, WV” is a gentle, airy piece with suitably gentle vocals…which makes the actual *content* of the first two verses much more disturbing. The lyrics are bizarre to say the least, but given the mention of "streets of solid gold" (referencing Revelation 21:21) in the third verse, the song seems to hint at the idea of Heaven being a truly Eldritch Location that mortal minds cannot comprehend.To which shepherd’s field
Did which angels descend?
And what’s this about eternal non-existence at the end?
A stranger’s face appeared—
They say he lost his mind
(Or too much found his mind?)
I hear it all the time
-
Vibrations rose in waves
From a sea of discontent
Dad used to talk about for days
I finally tasted what he meant
Your carcass on the ground
Brought vultures to their eyes
My frontal lobe is shutting down
I bet you hear it all the time - “August 6th” also has quite a lot of disturbing imagery, from “the remnants of loathsome, disjointed worlds” to “peaceful as moth-bitten, pin-cushion dolls making up myths about wounds without cause”, culminating in the final description of a huge, mechanical insect with “red, glowing eyes”.
- The entirety of the music video for "Julia (or, 'Holy to the LORD' on the Bells of Horses)".
- It begins with a simple image of the band members that becomes distorted by an Ominous Visual Glitch. Said image is accompanied with a pulsing siren and an eerie monotone voice reading aloud text from Nineteen Eighty-Four describing Room 101.
- The repeated emphasis on blinking security cameras.
- During the High-School Dance, one man ends up shoving another for pulling his presumed girlfriend away from him. He resumes dancing with her…only for Secret Police to show up and drag him away to Room 101 where they place a fishbowl full of rodents in front of him, referencing a scene immediately recognizable to anyone familiar with Nineteen Eighty-Four. The poor guy’s expression says it all.*
- Concurrent with this, Mike begins contorting and writhing on the stage and Aaron lets out a truly terrifying Metal Scream.
- Mike notices himself turning translucent in the same manner as Marty does in Back to the Future, and then the whole band ends up vanishing into thin air, leaving nothing but their clothes and instruments behind.
- The final shot is of the secret police calmly watching the dancer presumably being tortured.
- “Cleo’s Ferry Cemetery” is a much creepier rendition of “Cemetery” by Say Anything... with the singer more or less describing dying and being sent to a Fire and Brimstone Hell, along with repeatedly blaming the listener for their current predicament. The fact that the vocals and instrumentation themselves are soft and lullaby-like doesn’t help.