New album Foregone out February 2023

[eochaid]

Maybe it has too much energy. Or, maybe, it's one of the hardest songs for Anders to sing live. He could not sing it live today. That for sure.

This was one of those songs that cause a big impact (on me) at the first listening. It was a big fucking wow. And it's still one of my favourite songs ever.

 

[The Grayfox]

Schehf having a mediocre metalcore band makes a lot of sense. I DMed him years ago and asked what the chances of him covering The Jester Race or Worlds Within the Margin were and he said he wouldn't do those songs because he "didn't like those albums."

He campaigned pretty hard when Jesper left the band to get his spot. He was on Jesterhead and his campaigning was getting very fucking cringy. It was not at all clear to him that the band didn't want a fanboy as their guitarist. Not trying to be a dick either, but he was one of those "everything In Flames does is gold" people, and he was really pushing it hard. To the point that even other fanboys were like "jeez, calm down dude."

 

[The Grayfox]

Maybe it has too much energy. Or, maybe, it's one of the hardest songs for Anders to sing live. He could not sing it live today. That for sure.

This was one of those songs that cause a big impact (on me) at the first listening. It was a big fucking wow. And it's still one of my favourite songs ever.

The last time I watched a video of them playing it, Anders didn't even sing half of the chorus. I think this is one of those songs where they used a little too much studio magic and couldn't replicate it very well live. Not without a bunch of backing tracks anyway.

 

[DE4life]

Schehf having a mediocre metalcore band makes a lot of sense. I DMed him years ago and asked what the chances of him covering The Jester Race or Worlds Within the Margin were and he said he wouldn't do those songs because he "didn't like those albums."

He campaigned pretty hard when Jesper left the band to get his spot. He was on Jesterhead and his campaigning was getting very fucking cringy. It was not at all clear to him that the band didn't want a fanboy as their guitarist. Not trying to be a dick either, but he was one of those "everything In Flames does is gold" people, and he was really pushing it hard. To the point that even other fanboys were like "jeez, calm down dude."

I remember YouTube comments talking about Schehf replacing Jesper, didn't realise he had campaigned himself to take the spot though I wasn't on JH at any point so didn't see any of that. To be fair he probably could have done the job, but he was never going to get the spot over Niclas. By the sounds of it Schehf was basically the Krofius of JesterHead... interesting.

As for not liking TJR/Whoracle, that's a shame. Explains why he didn't have many songs from those eras on his channel though. I think he might have done Food for the Gods? He definitely had an Episode 666 cover. Not sure I remember him doing any TJR stuff. Possibly the live version of Moonshield.

 

[DE4life]

The last time I watched a video of them playing it, Anders didn't even sing half of the chorus. I think this is one of those songs where they used a little too much studio magic and couldn't replicate it very well live. Not without a bunch of backing tracks anyway.

In fairness that's the case for like, pretty much every IF song that has a clean chorus.

 

[DE4life]

MDM reddit are doing a 'rank In Flames albums' poll. My votes ultimately went like:



Clayman is my #1 without question, but TJR/Whoracle/Colony are all basically on the same level for me. Similarly Reroute, SOAPF and CC are basically on the same level for me also. The rest pretty much explains itself. Wasn't sure about ranking ITM higher than ASOP initially, but the vocals on ASOP are so bad that I actually would prefer to listen to ITM. At least that album has proper screams, decent production and cleans that don't sound like a wailing bellend.

 

[The Grayfox]

The thing about those classic records is they could change order at any given time for me, except TJR, which takes the top spot. TJR-Clayman are just so good.

 

[DE4life]

Clayman and TJR will always be my #1 and #2, undoubtedly. Colony and Whoracle will always be right there in 3rd and 4th spot.

So I was looking at the setlist of the Bloodstock show they played in 2007 (I was there) and wtf, I had no idea I'd heard the following songs live:

Dead Alone
Dark Signs (!) - only played 15 times and this was the last time they played it
Bottled - the fuck... I must have been raging when they played that.
Egonomic

Their performance at Bloodstock was unfortunately shit and they seemed to be drunk, but still.

Also from their 2008 London show I apparently saw:

I'm the Highway
Vanishing Light
Insipid 2000
Move Through Me

I had totally forgotten that I was there to hear those songs live. I don't actually remember any of them, honestly, so it doesn't actually mean that much, but still, cool story bro, etc...

 

[DE4life]

Just listened to Egonomic for the first time ina a while... what a strange song this is. As far as I can tell at 02:36 it's the second shortest in the IF catalogue behind Clad in Shadows '99 (excluding interludes, instrumentals and such). Even Jester's Door is one second longer.

Starts off with some pretty chaotic, not especially melodic riffing. First verse is Anders screaming over extremely basic, filler riffs whilst the drums just pretty much pound absently in the background. Chorus is then this nursery-rhyme style half-singalong half-screamalong that is totally at odds with the verses themselves. Second verse literally lasts eight seconds before going right back to the chorus! That's rush to the chorus to the extreme. Some more basic, downtuned riffing and simple melody slightly altered before once again going back to the chorus and then ending with the same chaotic riffs that the song started with.

I feel like based on the above description I shouldn't like this song at all, but for some reason I do.

 

[DE4life]

So, I just downloaded a program called 'Ultimate Vocal Remover' and it's really fucking good.

Taking the vocals out of Disconnected:



Vocals only:





Link to the program:

https://github.com/Anjok07/ultimatevocalremovergui

Warning: It's 3.5gb and requires fairly decent specs to work properly. It created Disconnected for me in about 5 minutes but my laptop is pretty good spec (i7-8750H, RTX 2070).

 

[eochaid]

Some nice melodies hidden behind the vocals.

 

[DE4life]

There always is. Now I just want to rip IF entire discography as instrumental

 

[DE4life]

One thing I do notice from the vocal tracks that are ripped is that Anders vocal lines/rhythm on ASOP is pretty fucked up. I mean... there really isn't any consistent rhythm to his vocals. I don't think in retrospect this was just an SC problem, more like a deeper issue masked previously by the instruments hiding the issues. Once vocals were put front and center and the instruments completely scaled back it makes this issue a lot more obvious.

 

[ThePhobiac]

So, I just downloaded a program called 'Ultimate Vocal Remover' and it's really fucking good.

Whoa, cheers for this. I'm going to lose so many hours playing around with this program.

Anders's vocals aside, I've always loved Disconnected. IF songs having so much melody and harmonies interwoven throughout the riffs is something I took for granted at the time it came out, and I think ASOP is one of the best examples of that style.

EDIT: This installed crippling malware on my PC but holy shit it's nice to hear these sweet isolated Anders vocals from Here Until Forever

 

[DE4life]

Malware, are you sure? None of my antivirus programs picked up anything like that.

Edit: Just ran scans with MalwareBytes and Spybot Search and Destroy and they didn't pick up anything... could be that they'e out of date I gues? Idk, @ThePhobiac let me know what malware was installed and I'll take a look and see if it's on my PC as well.

 

[DE4life]

Some other instrumental tracks:

Sleepless Again (actually sounds really nice instrumentally)



System



Crawl Through Knives



Suburban Me



Gyroscope (this is the version you've been waiting for @Xpyro125 )



Metaphor (I guess we can call this the 'Bjorn version' as this was what he intended before Anders asked to add vocals)



And finally, especially for @ThePhobiac, @Jester Slave and @ciko_gfb to cherish and treasure...

With Eyes Wide Open - Vocals Only

 

[DE4life]

The cool thing about listening to the pre-2008 instrumental tracks is that you get an idea of how it worked from Anders' perspective, as he would pretty much add vocals on top of what had already been created by the others. I mean, when he heard 'System' for the first time he must have been like, fuck... those verses are fast as hell and ae going to need some machine-gun style vocals. I've tried it myself with System and it's genuinely difficult to match vocal speed to the instruments. Also when he heard that clean section he would have known that was where he was going to have to come up with some genuine clean vocal melodies, as you couldn't just talk through that and it can't really be left empty either. Reroute as a whole must have been a real challenge for him when you consider he'd never had to really consider stuff like that before.

 

[The Grayfox]

Dude, what the fuck? That program is unreal. Now if we could get one to isolate specific instruments so I could remix some of those bad sounding IF songs...

But seriously. That's some crazy vocal isolation. I've never come across a program that could do that so cleanly.

 

[DE4life]

Dude, what the fuck? That program is unreal. Now if we could get one to isolate specific instruments so I could remix some of those bad sounding IF songs...

But seriously. That's some crazy vocal isolation. I've never come across a program that could do that so cleanly.

Yeah, for sure! I had no idea the software had come along like this. The power of AI and Deep Learning I guess. It struggles isolating the vocals in decent quality, but who gives a fuck about that when it comes to IF? Maybe for comedy value that final scream on TJR is actually pretty funny without any music behind it.

But yeah, fuck, I wish this kind of thing had existed ten years ago when I was doing vocal covers. Instead of scouring YouTube to find some half-decent sounding instrumental cover I could have just ripped the actual fucking song in almost perfect form without vocals. God fucking damn it. I'm long past being able to do those vocals now so it exists too little too late nonetheless, it's really cool listening to the IF back catalogue in instrumental form.

Also I actually did plan to do a Battles song but found that I had apparently deleted Battles at some point as it's nowhere to be found in my storage oh well.

 

[The Grayfox]

Clayman and TJR will always be my #1 and #2, undoubtedly. Colony and Whoracle will always be right there in 3rd and 4th spot.

So I was looking at the setlist of the Bloodstock show they played in 2007 (I was there) and wtf, I had no idea I'd heard the following songs live:

Dead Alone
Dark Signs (!) - only played 15 times and this was the last time they played it
Bottled - the fuck... I must have been raging when they played that.
Egonomic

Their performance at Bloodstock was unfortunately shit and they seemed to be drunk, but still.

Also from their 2008 London show I apparently saw:

I'm the Highway
Vanishing Light
Insipid 2000
Move Through Me

I had totally forgotten that I was there to hear those songs live. I don't actually remember any of them, honestly, so it doesn't actually mean that much, but still, cool story bro, etc...

I've been thinking recently about how much I like STYE. At the time of release, I was pretty 'meh' about it. I was at the show in Los Angeles in '04 for the DVD shoot. I don't think they ended up using that footage though. I think they used Sticky Fingers and Hammersmith footage (there may be some bonus content of Clayman and Episode 666 from LA?) It was pretty interesting getting to see the album played in it's entirety. Also the Blinded By Fear cover and a nice selection of old school songs. Dead Alone is a great song.