In Flames
Reroute To Remain

THE REVIEW

Boring, tremendously mannered, predictable, and firmly anchored to the genre's style. This is more or less my extremely acidic opinion of Reroute to Remain by the resurrected (even though some would have preferred them "six feet under") In Flames. Small clarification: the phrase in parentheses hides a wonderful pun that probably only I understand; anyone who manages to decipher the mystery can win a photo of my drummer, which I have in my possession as a prize offered by the bassist for the fiftieth poster on the guestbook of the site www.hatemoor.net. Of course, I won.

Boring, tremendously mannered, predictable, and firmly anchored to the genre's style. This is more or less my extremely acidic opinion of Reroute to Remain by the resurrected In Flames in just 32 words. Boring, tremendously mannered, predictable, and firmly anchored to the genre's style. This is more or less my extremely acidic opinion of Reroute to Remain by the resurrected In Flames in just 64 words. Imagine a lovely Christmas lunch. Now you are on the couch, a sizeable boulder is churning in your stomach, and with each passing second, your eyelids grow heavier. Apart from some rare jolts, let's say useless industrial quantities of Citrosodina, you reach seven in the evening with a completely stuck stomach, that annoying feeling of nausea begins to creep in... you want to vomit but can't, and you are forced to drag yourself from the exercise bike to the drums to the cat in an attempt to move and get your stomach and brain functioning again. Useless, completely useless, as soon as you start the virtual climb of the Gran Sasso, you feel the need to do something else, abandon the exercise bike and move to the drums where you sketch two or three 4/4 beats. No use... only the cat remains... eat it. Nothing, right? Yes... that feeling of heaviness remains, you feel bored and "gray." Exactly what you'll experience listening to this CD.

On Reroute to Remain, the most splendid arabesques have been built by the luminaries of virtual metal paper... the only thing I wonder is if they really listened to this album or if they fell to their knees in mystical rapture before the "nuclear blast priority" sticker that surely must have been proudly displayed on the package. Above all, there have been great disputes over the fact that, in alternate phases, many argued that the innovation of the In Flames sound led to an actual improvement in the group's music or a freefall from the Olympus of (Swedish) death metal, depending on how they woke up in the morning. The funniest thing is that this album is the same as all the others by In Flames (with the exception of the songs Trigger and Transparent which are truly little masterpieces) and consequently is boring, tremendously mannered, predictable, and firmly anchored to the genre's style. To make a new album, it is not enough to insert two or three "industrial" samples nor to put a damn clean vocal chorus in every damn track. Innovative things are either done well or not done at all. Certainly not done this way.