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‘Foregone’ - In Flames (2023) | New Album Review
49 Plays1 year ago
In Flames have released their best album in decades. Loved and praise by critics and fans alike, we break down ‘Foregone’ - the latest instalment from the Swedish Death Metallers!
You can also watch us on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC7mfJVCp_TzbPNZNMMemJuw
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Transcript
Introduction to Daria and Laz
00:00:08
Speaker
Hello and welcome back to Minds of Metal, my name is Daria. And I'm Laz and together we're a husband and wife team, both professional musicians who taught all things heavy metal.
Review of In Flames' 'Foregone' Album
00:00:17
Speaker
And today we're bringing you a quick review of a new album by In Flames called Form Gone. Yeah, this album came out last week, I believe it was the 10th of February and has been hugely well received by fans and critics alike. Do you want to tell us a bit about In Flames quickly?
00:00:34
Speaker
Yes, in flames are a Swedish metal band. And they started in 1990, so a while back. And throughout the 90s, they pioneered a genre called melodic death metal.
00:00:47
Speaker
That's right, yeah. Inflames have been constantly pumping out albums from the mid-90s through to now. But what we've heard so far and what we've seen as feedback is that actually the albums over the last 15 or 20 years haven't really hit the mark the same way that their earlier albums did. And apparently Forgone is a good welcome back to their quality songwriting. So to talk first off about the songwriting, I thought what was quite interesting is that actually, again, depending on the song, it almost started
00:01:19
Speaker
where you had a very overproduced, over polished synth and keyboard intro, or it would start with just like a guitar riff with the bass and drums behind it. And
Musical Elements and Techniques
00:01:27
Speaker
it didn't necessarily mean that the song would go on the same way that it started, but I thought it was just a different way to sort of keep the listeners on their toes and give you a different intro to a different kind of song. Yeah, it just has that modern feel to it whilst keeping it very, you know, traditional metal in places like harmonizing guitars, for example, are a very traditional metal element.
00:01:47
Speaker
So yeah, I really enjoyed that. Yeah. I thought another thing is that, you know, the songs flowed really well, I think. And you mentioned to me that they were very normal song structure, you know, intro verse, a pre-chorus chorus verse, pre-chorus chorus, solo outro.
00:02:02
Speaker
And I like that as well. One I liked was the song State of Slow Decay. I thought the flow of the song was fantastic. Each section sort of transitioning seamlessly one into the other. Really nice, that one. What I also really love about the songwriting is the use of acoustic guitar on this album. We have these acoustic little breaks. If you're listening to songs like Four Gone Part One,
00:02:25
Speaker
And in the dark, for example, you can really hear it. And there's a really cool acoustic outer and dialogue in B-flat minor as well. Such a funny title. But yeah, there you go. Which I really loved also. And I think they're using acoustic guitar here as like a little break from the heaviness almost.
00:02:42
Speaker
And yeah, I found that really beautiful and really clever. Yeah, I really enjoyed it as well. I thought that sometimes it would just sometimes spring upon you, just this random eight bars of acoustic guitar. And I thought that worked really nicely. They also used some other stuff as well. They had sort of some symphonic instruments in them. I don't know whether it was an actual orchestra or whether they just programmed it on a keyboard. But it was never obviously trying to put in a new instrument and making it like
00:03:08
Speaker
have some of this shove it in your face. It was always just an embellishment on top of it, and I thought that was really nice. Another
Accessibility and Audience Appeal
00:03:15
Speaker
thing I wanted to talk about was the tuning, because in a lot of metal these days, obviously you look at genres like gen and progressive metal, you will often find down tuned or detuned guitars, which lead for a lower sound, sometimes a heavier sound.
00:03:29
Speaker
Now, I don't know what tuning they're playing in here, but it all sounded very high up to me. If you asked me to make a guess, I kind of thought they'd be in traditional standard tuning, maybe a drop D, maybe even drop C, but it's not going like to the extreme sides of like the gen genre. And I thought it was nice because, you know, a lot of metal doing that nowadays is kind of refreshing for a band to kind of keep in the traditional style and just play in a standard tuning.
00:03:58
Speaker
So let's talk about the accessibility of this album a little bit. I really loved the fact that pretty much all the songs are around three, four minutes long. Yeah, not long at all. And that, surprisingly, for me personally, that made it really easy for me to just listen to it. Yeah, I think that an interesting point is that it is very hard. You have to be a very successful heavy metal band to make good money playing in this industry.
00:04:28
Speaker
If you want to be successful, I think accessibility is a huge factor in making your music reach more people. And as Dash mentioned, the fact that the songs are shorter, you know, a band like in flames who they have the
00:04:40
Speaker
the technicality, the ability and the comprehension to write seven or eight minute songs. But it's quite interesting, as you mentioned, that there are actually only three or four minutes here. I think that's better. And I wonder if they've done that on purpose to try and solve because there's a song towards the end of the album I'm going to talk about, but I think it's very accessible for the chorus. And you just wonder if they're kind of making them shorter so that they reach more people.
00:05:02
Speaker
Yeah, and I mean, all choruses are great on this album, aren't they? That's right, yeah. I thought the choruses here were fantastic. You've
Vocal Styles and Depth
00:05:09
Speaker
got this punchy, charm-along, anthemic chorus each time. Well, not every time, but on most of the songs. For me, I really enjoyed Bleeding Out, Pure Light of Mind, and a dialogue in B-flat minor. I thought those choruses were amazing. You liked them as well, didn't you? I liked Bleeding Out a lot, and it's in my head right now. I also really loved Sinosia. This is how you pronounce it.
00:05:31
Speaker
It's just that perfect tension and release in the chorus. I just absolutely love that. So yeah, I think choruses are a huge part of this album. I think what made the chorus is really special and epic. We've got quite a lot of screening and experience sounding growling going on in the verses and some middle sections of the songs, but choruses are led by clean vocals mostly, aren't they? You wanted to touch on that.
00:06:01
Speaker
Well, it's funny, actually, because when I was listening to the album, I'm not that familiar with it in flames. No, neither of us are, no. So I just thought I'm just going to give it a go. I'm just going to listen to it. And I didn't know that the band actually itself has been going for decades. So I was under the impression that I'm listening to a fairly young band because of the sound of the vocal.
00:06:24
Speaker
because the singer sounds actually, his clean vocal sounds so young. Like a 20 year old, yeah, no he does. He's done something, isn't he? Where he's just achieved this cleanness, this almost naivety within his voice of just sounding like a young person. I think that's his tone, that's his tone. Actually, I would love to hear his speaking voice. But doesn't it completely contrast with his screams? Because his screams sound like someone who's been doing them for 20 years or so. He sounds like an experienced growler.
00:06:54
Speaker
yeah i agree with that i do but i think the overall feel and the overall sort of sound i think they sound quite modern with this album in particular yeah what do you mean vocally the way they're i mean musically as well i disagree but that's why i disagree to disagree
00:07:14
Speaker
Another
Subgenres and Folk Influences
00:07:14
Speaker
great thing about this album which I absolutely loved is the genre variety. There is just such a big infusion of various metal subgenres going on which I found completely brilliant and the one that stood out for me the most was the folk influences that I heard. In the first track for example, the very first track of the album,
00:07:36
Speaker
I just didn't expect to hear something like this. I thought we were going to go straight in, heavy, headbanging, all of that. And you know, it reminded me of Adderall in Slipknot's The End So Far, another track that you just don't expect to be, you know, there, which is, yeah, I absolutely love it. And also I loved the folky sort of influences in Foregone Part 2.
00:07:59
Speaker
that was really beautiful for me you know with all these sort of melodies and if you were to say the heaviness out of it it could have just been a folk song to me yeah and that's indicative of where they come from you know coming from europe the european sort of metal movement was whereas in in america and the uk you had blues influencing metal right at the very beginning in europe there was kind of a pushback to the blues and instead they were way more classically
00:08:27
Speaker
traditional in that sense. And in this same way, the same way that you hear folk, and I hear that too, it could also be classical music. The first song, and even the intro to Foregone Part II, I think. Yeah, Foregone Part II intro, in the dark pre-chorus, the soft section, and the whole first song. If you, as Dash said, if you strip away any heaviness, that could be just a classical guitar playing. And I really heard the classical influences there, that's probably combined with the folk, giving us this kind of medieval sound.
00:08:57
Speaker
Other subgenres that I kind of heard within, I heard quite a bit of Power Metal, which I quite enjoy. The Meet Your Maker pre-chorus and the Deceiver intro. Metalcore, it's a hard one with this band because they were there.
00:09:11
Speaker
you know, maybe not perform, they were not doing metalcore, but they were there whilst it was rising and they were there during its peak, they were there at its inception as well. I think if you listen, you can hear little bits of kind of heavy, extreme metal slash punky riffs with his vocals over it going pretty heavy. For example, a dialoguing B flat minor, I just, the chorus of that song to me was just entirely metalcore.
00:09:34
Speaker
Now, electronically, this is something interesting, isn't it? Because I did mention at the start that we've got this, you know, whether they start the song electronically or traditionally, and we've got quite a bit of electronic influence in this album. The Bleeding Out intro, foregone part two, the verse, quite produced and polished and modern as well. And the last one I wanted to talk with about was quite interesting because I didn't think I mentioned the word rock in this video, but the fine song, End of the Transmission,
00:10:04
Speaker
I think if you play that chorus to 100 people on the street and say, what genre is this? They might say rock, because it's not that heavy. He's not screaming. I think there's, I think it's this kind of shout thing, but it's not screaming and the music behind it is nice and accessible as well. So I wouldn't, I wouldn't put it past people to label that a rock chorus just like I have.
00:10:26
Speaker
So kind of following on from the songwriting, I think if you sort of take a step back, you look at the album structure and the way songs are positioned. And I really, really love the first song. It is kind of an intro, really reminding me just that acousticness of, you know, a battery by Metallica, that opening acoustic part, you know, the first minute of clenching the fists of descent by machine head. Just this acoustic sounding, lovely melodies that just prepare you for what's to come.
00:10:55
Speaker
And I thought what was to come and the way it was structured was really interesting because you've got heavy songs to kick them off. The first two, maybe even the first three are quite anthemic choruses, lots of death metal riffs there, lots of screaming, lots of heaviness. And then as the album progresses, you kind of see the extent of their songwriting and what they can do being displayed in different ways. Pure Light of Mind is very different to Four Gone Part One. The end of transmission is very different to Sinosia. Sinosia, there you go.
00:11:25
Speaker
And I just loved that how they kicked it off, they let us know what we're in for, and then they just kind of explored different avenues of that, which was interesting. Equal parts melodic vocals and equal parts screaming, but all parts heavy.
Production Quality and Critiques
00:11:41
Speaker
Production-wise, this album sounds modern. You can tell where they were going for that accessibility we talked about, for sure. But it's not overproduced, is it? I don't think they've done too much on it.
00:11:55
Speaker
No, well, actually, for me, personally, I think they've done a bit too much on the voice in pure light of mind, in the verses. I just think it's a bit too far.
00:12:06
Speaker
Yeah it just makes it sound a little bit artificial for me personally. I feel like his voice lost that cool to it within in that production but again I think that's just all very subjective. There was another song, I think it might have been in the dark where in the chorus you've got high vocals harmonizing coming from either side and I remember when I listened to it and those high vocals came in I
00:12:30
Speaker
It wasn't unpleasant. I just remember thinking, oh, this is a bit odd. It kind of sounds a bit out of place. And there's a few things, I mean...
00:12:38
Speaker
I think, you know, with an album where the songwriting is sort of this quality, we'll sort of sum up our thoughts on it at the end, but I think we both agree it's a really solidly written album. It's okay to take, sort of, to sort of look at the negative aspects because you've got to do a review of the album overall. And there are just some parts of the production that seem to get out of place for me. I mean, if you go to about two minutes 30 in the dark, it goes from the pre-chorus into the chorus, but when the first chord of the chorus
00:13:08
Speaker
And it's like you can see on the, because we've done music production, I can imagine that they just copied and pasted on the software they're using, the first chorus to the second chorus. And it just didn't sound clean enough to me. And it's the sort of thing where I just sort of said, if I was in the band, I'd say, hold on, can we just look at that? Because that doesn't sound clean enough. Otherwise, though, I thought the mix was pretty good. I thought the volume and the levels of everything was great.
00:13:35
Speaker
One thing is I did feel that the songs were a little disjointed. The first song, they could have easily have done some sort of production thing to make the end of the first song flow into the second song and then to kick it off. You think any of Trivium's last three albums, they have that intro and then they prepare it with a little bit of production that takes you into the next song. And I kind of felt it was lacking in this song. Every song seemed to have an ending.
00:14:02
Speaker
And that's fine, but I thought there were moments where they could have just sort of done a little trick and said, let's blend this song into this song. I think there's like a reason for it that they didn't do it. I think it might be for radio play, might be there so that the songs are just sort of taken.
00:14:20
Speaker
individually so it doesn't seem like a concept album that's a good point yeah maybe but we don't know um but yeah otherwise thought production was good mix was good um a few issues here and there but overall nicely mixed album
00:14:35
Speaker
Overall I really really enjoyed it and this is the first album I've ever heard by In Flames and that makes me want to go back and explore their musical career really and just see what they did before because as you said the critics have said so many good things about this album
00:14:57
Speaker
And yeah, I can't wait to actually listen to what they've done in the past. But
Final Thoughts and Listener Engagement
00:15:02
Speaker
I really love the Anthemic Choruses. That's probably the biggest thing for me about this album. I think songwriting is so good on it.
00:15:10
Speaker
So, so good. And I think I really like that they're going into the more sort of accessibility kind of way because that is going to get the new fans. I'm sure of it. You know, that is going to maybe get some new younger blood in as well because of the synthetic chorus and because of the production, because of the electronics stuff that we talked about. So, yeah, overall, I think it's a great sort of modern sounding album with traditional metal
00:15:40
Speaker
stuff like harmonising guitars in it which I personally as a fan of traditional metal really enjoyed. Yeah I agree with a lot what you said. I liked the album, I don't think it was perfect but I liked about 75% of the songs. I thought the second half of the album was better than the first half and there were certain songs like
00:16:00
Speaker
pure light of mind, a dialogue in B flat minor, bleeding out, I thought were really good. Those are my favourites. Lots of great death metal there with some really intense, aggressive, heavy, shallow screams. What are we calling them? Screams, so screams throughout, you know, the dialogue in B flat minor verse, that God, that just got me really sort of headbanging along to it.
00:16:26
Speaker
overall really good stuff as Dash mentioned the choruses just sing along most of them you know nine times out of ten all of those choruses you can sing along put your hands in the air and you know like that um really interesting album would I listen to it again I would I would um and would it make me go back and listen to their other stuff
00:16:44
Speaker
Yes. So I think we may have managed to do that. So we'll get on and find a new band for us to listen to. Thank you so much for being here with us today. I hope you enjoyed our episode. Please don't forget to leave a comment with your thoughts on this album below the video and give us a like a share and subscribe to our channel.
00:17:01
Speaker
And if you're an In Flames fan and you've heard what we've said about this album, then you've got to let us know which album to go and check out next based on what we've said. Do you want us to go back to the start and do it from the beginning or should we go to like more recent ones? But yeah, as Dash said, thanks for joining us. Don't forget, if you don't have time to watch the video on YouTube, then we have a dedicated podcast for you to listen to during your commute. So thanks for joining. As Dash said, like, share, subscribe, comment and have a metal day. Have a lovely day. We'll see you very soon.