When Swedish melodeath pioneers IN FLAMES released their seminal album classics in the 1990s, I couldn’t give two shits about this new “Gothenburg sound,” to be honest. It was not until “Come Clarity” (2006) that I started to lend an ear to their music. Still, they were nowhere near my go-to artists in the metal scene at that point – just a nice little metal band from Sweden with a good few banging tunes. I was perhaps too much of a noob in the fine art of melodeath to judge their next few endeavors this way or the other, so I guess the band didn’t really leave much of a mark until they released probably their most divisive album, “Battles,” in 2016, on November 11th, via Nuclear Blast. By then, I had traced the evolution of their signature sound back to those earlier albums, and aside from 2002’s “Reroute to Remain” and its follow-up, “Soundtrack to Your Escape” (2004), those iconic classics didn’t end up on my record plate very often. Melodeath still wasn’t my number one cup of tea, although I would drink from it on occasion, I guess. So, I wasn’t really expecting “Battles” to win me over with a triumphant onslaught of the purest type of melodeath on this planet, but I found the savage criticism it received for not sounding like melodeath at all pretty hilarious as well. Old-school melodeath fans dubbed the whole endeavor as IN FLAMES trying too hard to sound radio-friendly. Who cares? Apart from a handful of carefully selected bangers from the pioneering Swedish bands, the cookie-cutter variety of old-school melodeath sounds boring as shit. Honestly, it’s every bit as generic as the GenX metalheads claimed this album to be, just differently. There I said it. (A shit-storm incoming in 10 seconds…)
Okay, the songcraft on this album was maybe not as coherent as on “Reroute to Remain,” for instance. There are hits and misses. It was not necessarily the best foot forward that the album opens with “Drained,” for one thing. The atmospheric intro is pretty promising, yes, but the rest does not quite live up to the promises lifted. The riffs are pretty decent, but the chorus is a bit bland. Yeah, I get it that the band wanted these songs to be played on the radio, but the opener resonates maybe a tad too thick with the air of “Let’s put on the silver suit and go through the motions.” I mean, it’s not wrong to sound catchy, nor is it a crime to flirt with pop flourishes, but you cannot just half-ass it – you need to put some effort into it. The following track, “The End,” is much better in this respect. Ah, yes, the song is essentially pop-melodeath – that is, an abomination in the eyes of the heavy-metal elders! Gatekeepers will not approve. Ever. I reckon that, if the melodeath connoisseurs did not have a moral seizure at this point, “The Truth” would trigger nothing short of a massive shit-fit a little bit later in the tracklist. The song rolls out even more prominent pop hooks, with kid choir and all! Needless to say, with yours truly being such a heretic, the song became instantly one of my favorites from IN FLAMES. But it’s not even melodeath?! Yeah, exactly.
The next cringeworthy abomination in this selection, for the melodeath Puritans at least, was most likely the song, “Through My Eyes.” The opening riffs attempt to capture the band’s old magic, I reckon, but then, the chorus is yet another radio-friendly singalong thing. Oh, the horror! Well, on this particular occasion, I might actually agree with the old guard: the song is pretty basic – not necessarily something to make you vomit, but nothing too fancy either. I could put it on as background music while my friends came over for a few beers on a Friday night. I could say the same thing about the title track, as well.
The album has been accused of being so repetitive and one-dimensional that it’s actually pointless to single out any songs. I would like to disagree here. The tracklist boasts a couple of songs that stand out by virtue of not sounding like IN FLAMES at all. Of course, if you were a longtime fan, that was not perhaps such a great thing to notice. “Here Until Forever” flirts with alt-rock flourishes and melodic hooks that sound almost like an homage to BRING ME THE HORIZON, especially their 2015 album “That’s the Spirit.” Then, “Save Me” is an electronics-infested rock song with emo lyrics. I guess the old-school fans were burning their IN FLAMES T-shirts at this point. The latter of these is pretty bland, to be honest, but the former is not such a bad song. Then, there is the peculiar closer, “Us Against the World.” It’s one of the tracks that even I’ve been forced to skip repeatedly; its mixture of radio-pop and melodeath just doesn’t cut it.
So, all things considered, the tracklist is nothing short of a bumpy ride with incredible peaks and massive lows. What remains quite noteworthy, however, in all this incoherent radio-pop frenzy, is the prominent role of Anders Fridén‘s clean vocals. While his cleans seem to divide the band’s fans almost as much as this album as a whole, I have no objection to hearing more and more of his clean singing. Sure, the screamed vocals remain one of his biggest fortes to this day – I’ve seen the band twice on stage in recent years, so I can vouch for that! – but Fridén is not such a bad performer in terms of clean vocals either. Sure, when you put your ear to it, I think Auto-Tune was used here and there on this album, but I’m not exactly sure why: those cleans worked pretty well in a live setting the last time I saw IN FLAMES on stage. Maybe 10 years ago things weren’t as fine and dandy, I don’t know. So, on top of all the other abominations, this album even featured Auto-Tune! I reckon most of the band’s fans dismiss this album as their worst ever, but since I don’t really give a rat’s ass about the holy tenets of melodeath, I found this album pretty decent back in the day. It’s not perfect, but it’s not thrash either. It’s not melodeath, really, but who gives a shit? I would love to hear its best bangers live one day, but I reckon the band does not want to upset their most loyal fanbase with these abominations.
Written by Jani Lehtinen
Tracklist
- Drained
- The End
- Like Sand
- The Truth
- In My Room
- Before I Fall
- Through My Eyes
- Battles
- Here Until Forever
- Underneath My Skin
- Wallflower
- Save Me
- Greatest Greed
- Us Against the World
Lineup
Björn Gelotte – guitars
Anders Fridén – vocals
Peter Iwers – bass
Niclas Engelin – guitars
Joe Rickard – drums
Label
Nuclear Blast
