IN FLAMES Guitarist: It's Important For Us To At Least Tread A Little Bit Of New Ground

John Consterdine of HardRockHouse.com recently conducted an interview with IN FLAMES guitarist Bjrn Gelotte. An excerpt from the chat follows:

HardRockHouse.com: "A Sense Of Purpose" is about to be unleashed, what can fans expect from the album both musically and lyrically?

Bjrn: I'm not writing the lyrics our vocalist Anders [Fridn] is but the main concept is about how people tend to do a lot of things, without actually thinking twice about what they do or why they are doing it. They are just doing it because they have always done it that way, running around without a sense of purpose. There is no reason for them to do stuff but they have done it always. The lyrics are also about small experiences that Anders had, that he's seen other people have and the way he can relate to them. Basically that's sort of the concept, each and every song is very different, it's not a concept album per say. Musically it's very guitar based, melodic, aggressive, up tempo, kick ass metal album basically. I'm extremely happy with the way it turned out and all the boy's jobs on the album. It's really fresh and I can't wait to go out playing it.

HardRockHouse.com: After hearing the promo of the album, it seems a lot more guitar-driven and the choruses are quite melodic, it really seems like a progression from the last few albums.

Bjrn: It sort of has to be for us. It's always been extremely important to at least tread a little bit of new ground when you're doing this because we're not one of those bands who can do the same thing over and over again, we don't feel comfortable with it. It's like with everything we do, we want to explore a little bit of new ground, take another step in a slightly different direction and see what fits and what doesn't fit and then learn from that and keep us on our toes.

HardRockHouse.com: The album also has the longest IN FLAMES song written, "The Chosen Pessimist". [The song itself clocks in at over eight minutes long].

Bjrn: Yeah, it is quite a long one. It was actually one of the last songs we wrote for the album; there was a great need for something like this. It breathes some air into the rest of the album because it is really compact and really intense. Anders was the first one to bring it up and mention it, that we might need something else, but we didn't want to do a ballad, we've done our sort of power ballad, we knew that we could do one and now we've done it. We wanted to do something else and it was interesting to work with something in this way that we did "The Chosen Pessimist", as it's more about the atmosphere, the sounds and the different parts of the song instead of a whole concept for the whole song, so it was really interesting working on that.

HardRockHouse.com: Do you plan on performing the song live within the next year or so?

Bjrn: Everything we write nowadays is planned to be played live but you never know, I mean it needs to fit into the live set and as we've mentioned we need at least another eight to ten minutes to perform it. It all depends on the set but it would be a great challenge and extremely interesting to do it live.

HardRockHouse.com: The cover art of the new album seems to have split fans, some saying it's not typical IN FLAMES and others saying it matches the band's progression. How would you respond to that?

Bjrn: It's exactly like with our music, we don't wanna be the typical band, we don't wanna be the guys who you can expect to do this and that. It's basically for our own sake; we want to have something that is not typical death metal or black metal or typical metal at all. Anders once said it and he said it really good, it's like something you'll find in a case of vinyl records from the seventies, it's really cool but at the same time really really modern. I also like it to have a lot of colours, it stands out compared to other CDs. Also it's very easy for us to do a stage set around it or you know posters. Parts of it as whatever backgrounds, it's easy to work around it, I really like it.

Read the entire interview at HardRockHouse.com.