The Attic

I have loved In Flames for there sound for a long while... I love the sharp changes they have from heavy to a light melody, one minute they're screaming, the next is almost a whisper. A lot of their songs have really either moved me or got my adrenaline pumping, and I absolutely love their style of lyrics, which usually seem more cryptic than anything else...

That said, the first time I heard this song, I loved the sound... The second time I heard it, it made me think about the lyrics... The third time I heard it, it chilled me to the bone.

I totally agree that it's about someone with severe mental illness, who has thus confined himself to his home and can't function in society... His apparent split personality seems to be utterly obsessed with whatever the mysterious 'strange machine' is, which is probably a metaphor, or a manifestation of his delusions... Or maybe he really is building some strange machine, who knows.

The part about the rope and a trap... Well, that's the part that really chilled me when I thought about it, and almost moved me to tears when I further thought about it... The only thing that comes to mind given the context, is that he hung himself to escape the delusions that plagued him. Reality is only an illusion after all, and it's shaped solely around your perceptions... So if those perceptions are detached from what's actually going on around you... Then anything goes... It would be like living in a nightmare, when all you want is to wake up, and when you can't, you end up at the 'last resort'. That and both of his personalities seemed to regard the other as foreign, when in fact they were of the same mind.

This song is haunting, mysterious, yet seems to draw directly from real world issues with insanity, something suffered by some but completely written off by society... And I don't mean 'mental illness' or unbalanced like half the damn world is, I mean the truly tormentingly insane, the sort that I think this song perfectly illustrates.

I almost never say this about music in our modern culture, and I certainly don't say this lightly, but this song truly strikes me as genius. I don't know if that's what In Flames was going for or not, but the thoughts I've had after reflecting on it have definitely broadened my perspective in a way that doesn't normally occur when reflecting on the work of ordinary minded people. Yet it's simple and eloquently put, short but profound... And very chilling. I don't think I'll ever think of one of those cases you hear about the same again, the ones where someone who was out of their minds committed suicide to end it all.

Or maybe I'm just reading into it too deeply... But either way... This song is amazing.