Reroute to Remain

I still recall the first time I ever listened to this album. It was back in 2002 when it was brand new and I still enjoyed the melodic metal scene. I seriously couldn't believed how much this fucking sucked. I still can't imagine it today when I don't listen to it, I'm actually doing so now for retrospect. Even the opening track "Reroute To Remain" which is the track I find least sucking bugs me enormously.

To still make a good review out of this I'm gonna take up my main beefs with this album. Anders vocal approach is just so damn annoying I want to shoot myself in the head. The screams are tolerable at most, hey at least they aren't as bad as on Soundtrack To Your Escape. But his extremely forced and terribly delivered clean vocals seriously send me into a raging spree every time I hear them. How can anyone have permission to record this kind of shitty singing? How anyone could even pretend to enjoy the clean vocal section in for example "System" is just beyond my understanding. Taking away the melody from the guitars and putting them in the vocals is just a fatal and terrible mistake that made In Flames go from tolerable at best to utter shit.

Another obvious source of shittiness is the production. Extremely muddy guitars with an extremely digitally sounding drums simply is not a good way to go. This simply makes it hard to hear what is played, and the really bugging thing is that that kind of production with vocals on top really is what make mallcore audiences enjoy this album.

The guitar work on here is so-so. It's pretty much the decent but much overused Gothenburg guitars of Colony mixed with mallcore stuff. I don't really find any guitarpiece on this album remotely taking my attention, It's all "meh". The closest they go to getting remotely interesting is the intro of "Minus", but that just gets repeated into oblivion.

"Egonomic", "Minus" and "Dismiss The Cynic" are the three most decent songs here for me. "Dismiss The Cynic" is actually almost good for about 30 seconds with a semi-interesting bass solo part, and it probably carries the least sucky chorus found on this album. As for shitty tracks the acoustics "Metaphor" and "Dawn of A New Day" as well as the retardedly mallcore:ish "Transparent" takes the prize. The singles "Cloud Connected" and "Trigger" are also displays of pure shittiness. Seriously, they aren't even catchy like Clayman was.

My summary of Reroute To Remain is that it's watered down overrated boring utter crap music that should be avoided at any cost. Hey, at least they were tolerable like 8 years ago..