Somehow better and worse than mediocre
I'm gonna be reviewing this album in a vacuum, due primarily to simple disinterest in the band after not caring for the few post-Reroute tracks I'd heard after only really latching onto a handful of classic tunes as a teenager anyway. I figured they weren't really for me and negative word of mouth combined with dreadfully confusing aesthetic choices seemed to confirm that. But hey, "Embody the Invisible" popped into my head the other day and I thought "Man, that song seriously fucks. I wonder what they actually sound like nowadays?" and thus gave their newest, Foregone a cursory listen. In Flames is easily the biggest and most divisive metal band that I've completely avoided Capital D Discourse on so I have a twenty-plus year gap in my knowledge and never cared about personnel changes or primary songwriters in the band, so this is probably going to be one of the shockingly few reviews that isn't predicated on comparing it to their recent albums.
What this sounds like to me is basically a pretty solid metalcore album from the mid aughts heyday of the genre (seriously add like three open string breakdowns to a few songs and this is an early Avenged Sevenfold album). Metalcore was always heavily based in melodeath anyway and In Flames was probably the biggest metal influence on the whole sound, and what this tells me is that the band simply assimilated into the genre that they inadvertently helped invent. There are tons of explosive sections that run sheer aggression, notably in tracks like "Foregone pt.1" and "State of Slow Decay", but I'd say the primary feature are the cleanly sung choruses. This is a shame because those are almost uniformly the worst part of any given song. I recall a few moments of clean singing on Colony that weren't good at all, but this new style he's adopted are just straight up cringe inducing. They are so overwhelmingly sweet that they've rotted out all of their teeth. Otherwise quite good tracks like "Meet Your Maker" are severely undercut by these absolutely awful clean vocals that sound straight out of the least catchy Periphery song you've ever heard. I have no idea why they're so prominent since they clash so strongly with everything surrounding them. They're all slathered in some sort of effect that makes them sound... well not quite autotuned but somehow fake anyway, like you fed an AI a bunch of Killswitch Engage songs and it spit out a rudimentary approximation of the A Day to Remember guy with none of his warmth or charisma (which is already disastrously lacking). They're the weakest element of the entire album by a mile and they make good songs flawed ("Meet Your Maker") and bad songs unbearable ("Pure Light of Mind"). "Bleeding Out" goes from a pretty okay chuggy/groovy song to a damn near unlistenable splattering of saccharine pap once the chorus hits, it is astounding how ruinous these vocals are. They're like a 50% accurate Ghost impression on "Foregone pt.2" and I'll never understand how not one person raised their hand in the studio and suggested a second take that didn't sound quite so comically embarrassing. I involuntarily started giggling when the music dropped out for a nearly a cappella moment during "In the Dark". Special mention has to go to "Pure Light of Mind" for being so, so much worse than anything else on the album. Anders is the worst part of that song of course but the structure and presentation is so sickeningly harmless that it's damn near nauseating. Anybody pegging that one as a highlight can be safely ignored because holy shit it's the absolute worst song on the album and it's not even close.
Excepting those truly atrocious moments, the rest of the album has some seriously good bones to build on. Amazingly, the vocals are pretty good when they stay harsh. It blows my mind that Anders can be such an atrocious, ill fitting clean singer while also supplying such intense harsh vocals. Sure there's nothing quite as feral as the "Will forever wander alone" bit in "Embody the Invisible" but he delivers some excellent intensity when he stops himself from sounding like Martin Steene with a swoopy haircut. There's more chugging than the best As I Lay Dying albums but they tend to come across as pounding instead of plodding. Tracks like "State of Slow Decay" kick things into an astoundingly high gear for a bunch of middle aged men who apparently abandoned speed and aggression well over a decade ago and I'd be willing to say that "The Great Deceiver" would slot in perfectly on any of those classic 90s albums. "Foregone pt.1" kicking off with delicious blast beats and infectious lead hooks is exactly the kind of thing that I had secretly hoped they would've done more of on those old albums instead of "just" being Iron Maiden with growls. The first half is clearly superior and the last four songs all kinda blend into one big megasong but it never truly hits a bad patch with a bunch of terrible songs in a row.
There's a real sense of identity here that's wholly separate from the era that gave them so much clout in the first place and manages to be good on its own. There's a sort of intangible confidence throughout Foregone and I think that's why it's endeared itself to me despite the achilles heel being so unavoidably pervasive. They toy with a couple different ideas, and not all of them work, but my Cynical Asshole alarm isn't going off while listening to this, it really does feel like the band truly believed in every one of these ideas, both the Clayman throwbacks and whatever dross "Bleeding Out" is supposed to be. As a guy who hasn't listened to a note of the band since 2007, jumping in all these years later has revealed them to be suddenly playing this very nebulous mashup of all sorts of heavy genres. Like there's is so much vibrant bounciness to a plurality of the riffs that I can only assume it comes from nu metal (I don't know how else to describe it: groove metal grooves, nu metal bounces, this album bounces), the choruses are pulled straight from emotional metalcore, the heaviest moments are unabashedly melodic death metal, et cetera. It all coalesces into something that resembles an alternative tinged Napalm Records style corsetcore pop metal that occasionally licks its teeth and suddenly ejaculates Whoracle at you. I guess if I had to explain what "alternative metal" should sound like if genre-obsessed giganerds ever bothered to codify it, I'd reckon it'd be something like this.
The main reason I was never able to truly get into In Flames as a teenager in the first place is because I felt like the quality of any given song was an absolute coinflip, constantly rocketing between rousing, evocative barnburners and the most unengaging shit imaginable. It's kinda nostalgic to check in on the band for the first time in nearly two decades and learn that they're still struggling with that exact same problem. I hate to sound like some kind of grouchy luddite but the fact is simply that In Flames, despite toying with increasingly modern, glossy, and unthreatening elements throughout recent decades, seemingly still aren't all that good at incorporating them while they still have genuine skill in replicating the early style that made them metal legends in the first place. Foregone is such a strange experience for somebody who lacks as much context as I do, because I have no idea if the bad parts are any better or worse than the last six albums. There are a lot of flaws and a lot of the ideas are largely unappealing in isolation, but there's a je ne sais quoi that keeps me from outright saying it sucks despite only truly enjoying like three songs without caveats. What the fuck am I supposed to do with that, ratingwise? Like it's not good enough to just be good, and it's definitely bad enough to just be bad but that's only truly regarding certain elements that coat the whole experience like a fine mist, and most of the songs are inoffensive but uninspiring but are simultaneously better and worse than mediocre. What kind of mobius strip of a grading scale would such an anomaly even map onto?
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