The devil sat on my shoulder today and let out an auto-tuned whisper straight into my ear: "let's turn on Down, Wicked & No Good"
I've forgot how much of a joke that shit was.
Not even considering the fact that all four are genuinely great songs, just not... these versions of them.
It's No Good feels like the only one out of three studio-recorded ones that even a sliver of effort was put into by the band. Not that it helped, mind you.
Down in a Hole and Wicked Game feel like those made-for-TikTok covers of popular songs where it's just dramatic/pseudo-cinematic synths, a drum machine, and a girl with a soft voice singing the lyrics without any sense of emotion or purpose that was in the original song, except that in this case the girl was a grown ass man with an ultra-processed, almost robotic at times voice. And sometimes there's a couple of guitar chords in the background by, presumably, Bjorn.
Hurt was erased from everyone's memory so hard that they didn't even acknowledge it in the EP title. I've heard them do it live in 2017 and my mind's defensive mechanisms have also erased that from my memory.
This kinda applies to this whole EP as I've completely forgot about it until today, and now I'll try to forget about it again. Delete the past, every step is pure.
I actually really love their cover of It’s No Good. I think that sort of new wave/synth rock style was a far better and natural direction for them to go with flirting with pop than Battles tried— Low bar, very low bar, but I think they actually did a great job with both respecting the original and making it their own. Even the autotune sounds natural and like a stylistic decision with primarily reverb and a bit of delay rather than Howard Benson being Howard Benson, which I’m not sure I could say about any other song since Battles.
I think their cover of Down in a Hole would’ve been better if it wasn’t so goddamn sappy and ridden with autotune. It could’ve been something, even if it couldn’t ever have come close to the original with the approach they took. I would’ve actually loved to see In Flames go kind of grunge-y, and I think that genuinely could’ve worked in its own way if they tried it back in the Come Clarity-SOAPF era. Boring, heartthrob pop Down in a Hole though? Not a great move.
Wicked Game is boring, it doesn’t even deserve a paragraph of its own, it’s just the same deal as Down in a Hole but with no potential to be good no matter what they could’ve tried. They should’ve never even considered covering it, the original’s already far and away the weakest song out of the four they covered.
Their cover of Hurt, in studio and live, is a dumpster fire. It’s House-tier. I know Anders screams in it to sound desperate, but it works as well as putting lipstick on the Empire State Building to make it look pretty. It was already a bad plan for them to even attempt to cover either the NIN version or Johnny Cash’s cover, and the band going for a sort of hybrid but not really makes it that much worse.
In a post-Battles/pre-ITM world, the EP actually made me kind of excited for what direction they’d go in because I just listened to their cover of It’s No Good over and over and willingly forgot the others. I also find a sort of beauty in the band covering Depeche Mode so many years apart, with distinctly different approaches, and somehow getting it right (to me) both times. That sort of understated chorus melody is something a lot of people, myself included, loved when they tried it for SOSD, and I think it works even better for their style of brooding, new wave-y synth rock… On the one song. That’s pretty cool, I don’t know. I can’t in good conscience recommend listening to the whole EP either, particularly post-ITM, but their cover It’s No Good is pretty great.
