Interpretations:Trouble Awful Devil Evil

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Dracula Sleeps

This song is pretty clearly about a vampire slumbering. It's a pretty humanizing take on a bloodthirsty monster. --deathgecko (Evil Emperor of Lizards) (talk) 17:26, 15 September 2015 (EDT)

I thought this too, or at least a vampire. But I think it's just using the vampire as an allegory for some people blithely going through life oblivious (sometimes willfully) of the horrible things going on around them. Some of that's necessity, but other times we are just too self-centered in our own comfort to give those things much thought. CJSF (talk) 09:00, 14 April 2020 (EDT)

"Sleeping is a Gateway Drug to Being Awake Again"

To me, this song is a dissonant ode to using excessive sleep as a coping mechanism for depression and being overwhelmed with life. When the narrator sleeps, he doesn't have to deal with the "trouble awful devil evil" that surrounds him and the "bat wings flapping just over my bed". He'll sleep for ten thousand years if he has to, because it beats being awake. FriendlyLocalGeek (talk) 08:52, 4 April 2016 (EDT)

Drugs?

Sounds like a simple song from the perspective of a drug user trying to escape the difficulties of life. --Mishuga (talk) 16:48, 26 September 2016 (EDT)

Mankind's evil (and/or his predicament) and his obliviousness to it

I think the key is the 10,000 years part: "Ten thousand years have passed and still I continue to descend"

That's pretty close to the start of human civilization, where we splintered from the rest of the animals to take over to the world. The line: "The weight of my insensate body draws all the bedclothes down with it"

the 'bedclothes' here is the rest of the planet. All the Dracula references ("bat wings", "arms 'crossed my chest", "evil", "devil") are just used as paint, to paint the 'sleeper', us, and the impending doom, something bad in the future.

Anxiety is a theme in a lot songs here and this one is right with them. What makes this one different is the fairly strong wording, over and over again, trouble, awful, evil and devil. It progresses from a threat to a horror in four simple words..--Statespace16 (talk) 14:20, 29 December 2016 (EST)

Interpretation 5

I don't think this song has a deep meaning, though it is an excellent little dramatic conception. It's very visual (which is one of Linnell's greatest strengths as a lyricist, creating visual scenes, as in a line-up of animals in "Mammal," or a man seeing himself in a room drinking in "Your Own Worst Enemy," or what-have-you. It seems Linnell has been using more cinematic allusions, to films real or imagined, in the last ten years. Another example would be the Kubrick-like scene in "2082." I believe "Awful, Trouble, Devil, Evil" is simply a brilliant evocation of a vision. The character may be a vampire or something; I know nothing about that genre, so I can't say. But if there is no scene like this in an actual silent film, there ought to have been. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 108.213.77.190 (talk) 15:47, May 6, 2017‎

Goya's etching

This song seems like a fairly obvious reference to the classic drawing by Goya. Just look at the picture and the title:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Sleep_of_Reason_Produces_Monsters
-- Thread Bomb (talk) 02:54, 14 April 2020 (EDT)

Sung By A Corpse

I can't see the lyrics as anything other than describing the experience of a death and funeral from the perspective of its guest of honour.

The bat wings swirling around overhead are the mourners dressed in black, and in the song he is literally lowered in a casket (his "bed") into the ground, oblivious to the sadness of those surrounding his body, and with its calm smile and hands over its chest, it looks serene and peaceful, dreaming of happy things

The protagonist continues his journey in death, as calm and still as ever, and the literal pit he's in is metaphorically bottomless in that death is eternal and everlasting, while the world carries on with its trouble awful devil evil without him there to be troubled by it himself.

Vampocalypse

I believe this song could be read as someone being converted into a vampire, but in a unique and very tmbg way.

Essentially, I think this version of vampirism has the bitten's conscious mind drifting into an endless, dreamlike happiness, all while their physical body harbours the bloodthirst and violence in order to survive. The mind is left, as the song says, "oblivious" and thus blissful.

As for the actual story here, I think the speaker in this song goes to sleep one night and is suddenly drowned in joy—this is them being bitten and transitioning into the new headspace—and their mind remains like this forever as their body lives as a vampire. Much like how the mind can convert physical surroundings into dreams, the speaker here imagines/dreams they are sinking through their bed and into a happy void for eternity.

Meanwhile, as thousands of years pass, the world becomes darker and more dangerous...more Gothic in its scenery. Either this is how the world would look to the speaker's vampire side, or this is literally how the world is becoming, being taken over by the spread of vampires...

All while the speaker's conscious mind is falling deeper into clueless happiness. Small mercies. -LapinPuff (talk) 22:24, 3 February 2024 (EST)

Peace Wonderful Angel Good

I don't think this is literally about anything, rather a meditation on the idea of being unconscious of evil, and if you are unaware of it, is it there? "If a tree falls in the forest . . ." etc.