Soundtrack to Your Escape

Someone obliterated my last review of this album, and I can't say I'm self sacrificial enough to scrape my mind for aforestated details, so here's a brand spankin' new testament.

In Flames were among the fistful of acts introduced to me back when I was first breaking myself into the more extreme branches of the genre. Revisiting The Jester Race and Lunar Strain honestly don't hit strum the same chords they did back when I thought White Zombie was knee-bucklingly crushing (it's true, and I'm sorry), but overall, they were solid swedish melo-death albums with raspy, tense vocals and aggressive, almost Iron Maiden-esque melodies. A purty package.
Whoracle didn't really impress me however, and realizing how little I actually cared for the style, I jumped ship and lived a basically In Flames-free existence, pillaging lubeless booty in the name of all that is Porngrind and punching wankers in the throat for lumping Decapitated in with progedies of death metal

Plow forward about 4 years after my original review, and while my pirate-antiquated assholery has dissipated, my opinion of this album has basically remained unchanged. In Flames finally ditched the abhorrently flowery guitar tone after what, 4... 5 albums of diarretic insanity? What a fucking horrible decade its been. But anyway, while the material is by far the heaviest its been since Lunar Strain, it's also the most cock-rockin' and John Davis fellating metal I've heard since fail came to failtown. For some reason, I felt Reroute To Remain would be the puny plateau of faggotry that would tip the band back down the slope of quasi-proper metallicism. How wrong I was.
In a sense, this is your fault.
Everyone who accepted, nay, TOLERATED this band for their "experimentalism" and committed it to paper basically launched an arsenal of sunflowers seeds in hopes of shooing away the nu-metal pigeons. Fuck this poorly concieved metaphor, and fuck you!

The opening track is what threw myself (and many others) off upon first listen; F(r)iend is actually decent. Well, for what it is anyway: an aggressive, hoarse-throated, nu-approach to the classic Swedish death metal sound. Unfortunately, all momentum this track christened the album with is smeared away in a blaze of KY Jelly when the band's hit single, The Quiet Place kicks in and revs up the most fruity set of keyboard whistles I've heard since Europe sent the "cherokeeee, marchin' on the trail of te-yars". Anders patents the pop approach and sucks up to Kurt Cobain with a soft verse, hard chorus schematic, and single handedly sets off a reaming disinterest in me so great I threw away all of my Rottrevore albums in generalized disgust of everything in existence.

The next 10 tracks are basically identical to the aforementioned colostomy bag, and deliver dark, scathing lyrics like "I can be as angry as I want to be" and riffs heavier than a Wham!/Dead Or Alive collaborative supergroup. No lie. The only track that breaks free of this monotony is... hm. Y'know, I honestly can't remember whether it's track 6 or 7. Well whatever. The only real benefit of this album is the utterly hilarious video accompanying the track Touch Of Red. Holy living fuck, I can't remember the last time I laughed so hard. In Flames go rockstar, complete with a scantily woman carwash and the band wandering around in their brooding gangstah way. Oh man.

Avoid this piece of shit.