Artist: In Flames
Label: Nuclear Blast
Released: 2008
Length: 48:33
Rating: 4/5
The art of turning yourself from a pioneering, bristling death metal band that put out nineties albums like “Jester Race”, “Colony” or “Whoracle” (any one of which is a must-have in every household’s record collection), dusting yourself with vanilla powder and becoming broadly accessible to music-loving masses around the world is a serious skill. And In Flames are right at home with it.
Funnily enough, they haven’t lost all that much in the quality gap they crossed with “Reroute to Remain”, though you have to be unburdened by the band’s nineties output to see it that way. With “Clayman” the guys started softening their sound, and with “Reroute To Remain” they set off down a new path, the one they keep walking on “A Sense Of Purpose”. The new album pushes the “softening” and “sweetening” of the sound even further. That’s the overall feeling when you fight your way through it. In Flames prove their seasoned experience here too. These are excellent musicians, after all, who keep the band in its current guise with the aim of chasing ever greater commercial success. Be honest. Who would step off the charted course after breaking through in the US, which the two previous albums proved by climbing the Billboard chart: “Soundtrack to Your Escape” at no. 145 and “Come Clarity” at no. 58. And “A Sense Of Purpose”, with its highest placing yet on the American BillBoard chart (no. 28), only confirmed that sticking to the path was the right call.
So. Even after 2002 and the “turning point that guaranteed their survival”, In Flames remain loyal to the search for a cunning compromise between aggression and mass appeal. That means a lower-tuned, smeared, rasping wall of riff sound in the background, occasionally enriched with “industrial”-flavored samples, into which the masters of the Swedish school weave ultra-melodic triad harmonies that “seemingly” soften the sound. Above it all hovers the extreme vocal, which never gets beyond a melodic, mid-range screech, compatible at best with the newfangled metalcore crews. So it’s a commercially winning walk along a thin middle line that offers an extreme of aggression the average ear still finds very comfortable, while handing listeners a quasi-moralistic way to brag to their peers: “Look how brutal the music I listen to is!” And reading between the lines, In Flames haven’t been brutal for a long time now.
It’s well known that the guys have worked female vocals into their music in the past, alongside Friden’s (already “pretty” by nature) screaming, or blended it harmoniously with clean backing lines. This time too, maybe more than ever, the share of clean vocals is growing, whether as harmonic accompaniment in the chorus (The Mirror’s Truth, Drenched In Fear, Alias), or even taking absolute priority in a song like the eight-minute The Chosen Pessimist, which also delivers the most interesting moment of the new album and brings it some badly needed variety and dynamics. It’s a ballad-leaning track that leaves a mark when you listen, especially thanks to the gradual filling-out of the sonic picture, which at the close delivers a one-of-a-kind atmospheric payoff, where synths play the lead role in such a massive wall of sound, and the mood builds slyly with added samples that could just as well have wandered over from the “industrial” school. Friden stays clean and melodic throughout this track, and even throaty “Bono-style” sighs aren’t off the table. His “normal” approach certainly doesn’t offer anything unique or any special recognizable charisma, but in itself it fits perfectly within a song of this type.
Most of the songs, though, are three-to-four-minute wreckers of simple but possessed riffing, typically combined with polite “In Flames-style” triad harmonies and curt rhythmic pounding, commanded of course by the obligatory double bass drum pedal. Through these songs the guys achieve the required variety and with it an injection of high-flow dynamics. So the band delivers another album that again fuses aggression with highly melodic accessibility, the standard In Flames way. It feels even “softer” and a touch “prettier” than the previous three, which makes it even friendlier to the charts. Thanks to their exceptional knack for building in the melodic component, there are quite a few candidates on the album that could follow The Mirror’s Truth as hit singles.
In Flames march safely onward in the trendy sphere they mapped out at the start of the new millennium. The furthest the new stuff lets a whiff of the old slip through is, say, in the song Alias, but no further back than “Clayman”. “A Sense Of Purpose” is, overall, an album that proves how cunning, experienced and excellent the musicians in this band are. We all know that with their intellect and skill they could offer more. But isn’t great rationality, the economy of clearly measured, simple moves that graft the familiar mold of big compactness and polish onto the songs, also part of that great understandability? It’s just that the goal is reached through absolute control over the supply of musical ideas and by following the principle of “less is more”. So this is an album that, in a musical-artistic sense, brings the band neither victory nor defeat. It only confirms that In Flames keep skillfully steering with their own built-in navigation system, and so deftly stay relevant.
Lineup
Anders Fridén – vocals
Jesper Strömblad – guitar, backing vocals
Björn Gelotte – guitar, backing vocals
Peter Iwers – bass guitar
Daniel Svensson – drums
Production
In Flames, Roberto Laghi & Daniel Bergstrand
Tracklist
1. The Mirror’s Truth
2. Disconnected
3. Sleepless Again
4. Alias
5. I’m the Highway
6. Delight and Angers
7. Move Through Me
8. The Chosen Pessimist
9. Sober and Irrelevant
10. Condemned
11. Drenched In Fear
12. March To The Shore
