Metal Reviews

I say don't, only because its so random that its kind of funny.

That statement is false. Very different bands.

Holy Terror knows about as much about swedish death as I do about his beloved thrash.

I'm all for bands like Coroner, Kreator, Sadus, etc. But all these 90s metal fans are just emofags that are the cause of all the crap on popular metal radio, so maybe I'm just not worthy of them.

So what are you trying to say?

In Flames definitely was a great Melodic Death band. Their style used to be unique, and there's nothing like putting an old In Flames cd in your car and smoking a big blunt, these guys blast you away into space... Until Clayman came out in my opinion, these guys kicked ass. This is one of their best albums. If you don't own this you should consider buying it 'cause you can't regret it. Sure they were very influenced by At The Gates, the question is, who cares? They were still a great band, and what band doesn't have influences anyways...

When the fuck did these get reviewed??? Wow I am unobservant sometimes.

These sorts of arguments seem to come up everytime In Flames is mentioned on this site. People have been trying to rip these guys a new asshole since Clayman. It got even worse with Reroute, and my god did all hell break loose with Soundtrack to Your Escape. Shit, when Jay did his review for Sountrack he even went so far as to attack the fucking NAME of the album.



How the hell do you get that out of "Soundtrack to Your Escape? "I'm sure you are a wealth of metal knowledge but what in the goddamned fuck were you smoking when you wrote this?? Jesus H. Christ, it's just the fucking name of the album, it's just whatever the band thought "sounded cool," which is how 99% of these album names are thought up in the first place.

I saw these guys get ripped review after review and I said, "Oh well people hate them, big fucking deal right??" What's the point of arguing? It's been said already that no one's mind will ever be changed. So I left it at that, until I noticed EyeSore posted a thread about the new In Flames being leaked and like flies to shit, the In Flames lynch mob rushed in there to say how terrible it was. Eyesore did a valiant job of trying to defend it, but of course it went nowhere.

This has been boiling in the back of my mind for some time now, and I never knew quite what I wanted to say until Radical Cut pointed out that this argument comes down to age. To the old school metalheads I'm sure In Flames seems like an unworthy usurper. But it doesn't matter what generation you are from, the "kids' music" always sucks, and whatever you grew up on will always be the best.

What finally got on my last nerve was the constant "Nu-Metal" lable that In Flames gets slapped with. I know exactly what Nu-Metal is because I ate, breathed, and slept in it day in and day out all through highschool. I was that mopey kid in the suburbs. I knew every Korn, Deftones, Disturbed, Godsmack, P.O.D, Linken Park, Marilyn Manson, Drowning Pool, Sevendust, Coal Chamber, Mudvayne, Slipnot, and DrykillLogic album inside out and backwards. I moshed to Spinkshank, Nothingface, Ill Nino, and Chimaira when they were just barely getting started. So do not try to tell me what Nu Metal is, I will tell YOU what nu metal is.

In Europe you have ancient cultures, ancient battles, post WWII nihilism, tribal feuds that go back for centuries, and many rich histories and mythologies to draw upon. And That's largley what metal is, a mythology used to tell stories and express existential crisis, which Europe has in spades.

Guess what, in America, we don't have any of that. This is a country in a constant state of self contradiction, and identiy crisis. As a melting pot of many different peoples there is no unifying culture or religion to speak of. This lack of a soul is often covered up by psuedo patriotic bullshit. Subconsiously, America is self loathing. That is the essence of Nu-Metal, that self hate, the foundation of which was set forth by alternative rockers Nirvana, and later furthered by the likes of Smashing Pumpkins. Smells Like Teen Spirit was the atom bomb dropped on MTV land. The entire Nu Metal explosion can be traced back to that one song.

We have plenty of American bands who have taken European Metal ideas and created something very similair but also completely seperate. (Radical Cut already touched on this in another thread) Killswitch Engage borrows from Scandinavian Melodic Death, yet it doesn't get called that, its called metalcore. Darkest Hour also heavily relies on Europoean melody but this site has it labled New Wave of American Metal. The Black Dahlia Murder has hints of black metal, but we don't call it black metal, its called blackened death.

Yet the very second a European band like In Flames starts to Americanize, it is immediately labled Nu-Metal. That my friends, makes ABSOLUTELY NO FUCKING SENSE. Even if In Flames were literally trying to become a Nu-Metal band they would fail. They would create something similair, but there would always be a noticable difference, maybe they could call it "The New Wave Of European Nu-Metal?"



Yea and you know that because you were there when the songs were written? I wonder if you would say that face to face with Jesper Stormblad? I really doubt it.



Hey you know what Holy Terror, go download some Fear Before the March Of Flames, or Jacob Ready for Battle, if you think you know what harcore screamo is, because right now you have you're head shoved so far up your ass it's pathetic.

And when In Flames rolls into Denver with the likes of Trivium and Devildriver next month, I will be there having a good time to whatever the hell they want to play, all while the ancient relics sit at home and think about how much they hate kids.

Holy shit. Even I never put that much effort into Holy Terror.

Noble effort man, but you're better off just ignoring him. As you may have suspected, he really doesn't have a clue when it comes to music outside of thrash, and therefore isn't worth the time.

The band got ripped more as they progressed because they continualy watered down their sound in order to make their music sell better.



Did it occur to you that perhaps these people did not like the argument? Sure, some of it was over the top, but In Flames sold their souls with Soundtrack to your Escape and a backlash is inevitable.



Bullshit. I'm 22 and I hate what In Flames has become. I like both old Metal from the 70s and 80s as well as modern Power, Death and Black Metal. This ultra-defenive attitude that people who bash newer bands are stuck in the past is idiotic.



Fine, you're a Nu Metal connosieur. You want reverence for it or something? Are you telling me that Soundtrack did not incorporate vocals, lyrics and guitar tuning (as well as simplified riffs) that were made popular by the nu Metal scene?



WHAT??? What the Hell is this?



You act as if "The Europeans" give out new names to styles of music taken up by American acts. What are you basing this on? Metalcore is not called Melodic Death Metal because it is a different genre.


So what you're essentially saying here is, after you've decided you like a band they can change their music to whatever they want and you will still like it?

Your last comment is just a petulant, childish little snipe which doesn't even merit a reponse.

Dude, if you want us to believe you hate people who follow band threads around just to flame them, you should have been less enthusiastic about asking to join Gast and DM's Opeth bashing tag team.

Seriously, (speaking as someone who doesn't own an old or new In Flames album, likes a lot of mainstream music, also grew up with nu-metal, and pretty much never bashes something on grounds of popularity) I hope you know that people criticising other people for caricatured anti-mainstream arguments is infinitely more irritating to the neutral than the "sell-out" argument itself.

Nice to see someone with a bit of spirit, though, however off-target his arguments are.

. . . I swear to god....



Again, people making comments like they personally know the band. You don't KNOW why they changed anything.

It doesn't matter anyway, that wasn't my point. Everyone is free to love and hate whatever music they wan't, I can't change that, nor would I want to. I posted the comment about Jay's review because it demonstrated the rediculous lengths people are going to demonize In Flames. Don't like them? Fine. Absolutely fucking hate them? That's just great. But don't try to sit there and tell me that the very NAME "Soundtrack to Your Escape" was specifically designed to attract "Nu Metal Kiddies" as it was put. That's giving them WAY too much credit. These aren't marketing geniuses we are dealing with for Christ's sake.



I never said anyone was stuck in the past...... I posted the comment about older generations disliking newer music because
of these comments made by holy terror.





I disagree with the things he said, but I was also trying to see the argument from HIS side. Obviously he does not approve of the modern incarnations of metal, and I was merely explaining that in terms of Old Vs. New. Yes, I know not every old school metal head hates the new stuff, and not every young one is going to like whats just comming out. I know, but at least part of the animosity towards In Flames has to do with age and that was already established before I said anything.



Oh shit that reminds me, I forgot to add Cold and Seether to my Nu Metal list. No reverence is necessary, but I'm not going to stop you either. :twisted: Nope I'm not going to deny In Flames incorporated anything, that was never my intention, you would know that if you could read.

I realize my comments about Europe and America may have been bewildering, and I agonized over whether or not to expand on those points, until finally deciding that it was going off in another tangent for another thread, and unnecessary. I don't need to delve into the cultural foundations of the music to make the argument that In Flames can't be defined as simply Nu Metal.



Actually, if you read my post which you yourself have quoted, you would realize I never claimed that "Europeans" named anything.



*sigh* Radagast, that was my whole fucking point. I listed those American bands with European influences to demonstrate that simply having influences of one style or another doesn't make you that style, it creates something different. So what do you do? You go and agree with me.



Yes, to a degree indeed. Look, the principle bitch here is that the new In Flames has bits of Nu Metal in it. IM NOT DISAGREEING. All I am trying to say is they are still light years away from ANY of the bands I mentioned above. They are not Nu Metal, they merely incorporate it into their already established melodic death. That's what I meant by Americanize. Where do you get off saying one is not the other?



No jug head, that's not what I'm "essentially saying." I'm saying I still have respect for these guys based on previous works, and even though they have decided to gravitate away from what they established, I would still pay to see the guys responsible for Black Ash Inheritance in person. Same goes for Children of Bodom, and Soilwork.



Yea except you already responded to it you fucking genius. And if you though THAT was childish, you should probably not look at this picture:





Rio I don't need you to "believe" anything. I made comments about ONE Opeth album, in the context of the 2005 awards. And if you care to read that post I also talked about Dark Tranquillity. I wasn't just Opeth bashing. It's not as if I have ever even considered stepping foot into an Opeth review thread. You're comparing two totally different things there buddy. And as far as the the second sentence you wrote... I have no fucking idea what your talking about.

Dude, don't be the Quote Guy. The Quote Guy is the "THAT Guy" of the internet. We've all been there, I used to argue like this when I first started getting my feet wet online. It's not worth it in the end. Once complete thoughts start getting broken down into individual sentences you're not arguing anything on the initial discussion, it becomes a war of semantics that can be twisted freely by both sides. Arguing like this online is outdated like "Word Is Bond."

Say your piece in a friendly, mature way and once the argument starts to deteriorate into what you see above, just move on.

Discussing In Flames is akin to discussing politics, religion, race or abortion with a bunch of people with differing views. Eventually someone is going to get murdered. Haha. In Flames are not nu-metal at all, citing lyrics, guitar tone, vocal approach, etc. is simply too vague for me to say they're nu-metal. Yes, they have wandered off into that direction occasionally, but they never got there. That is my opinion, but others will disagree, as we see here, and as we saw in the other thread I created.

My suggestion is to just drop it when it gets to this point. People have a valid debate with Soundtrack To Your Escape, but that album has come and gone. Come Clarity is not nu-metal in the least, so just let it go.

And goddamn...calm down.

Then either read it again and try harder, or drop it.

Vexed that someone has taken the time to get totally pwned by Radagast but is unable to decipher the syntax of one of my sentences... Especially given that it carried a valuable lesson for him...

Now who's being the teacher?

Wink.

Flamey Smiley

Pffft, I've said what I want to say and I'm totally satisfied with it, I'm not going to start repeating myself.

PS: Giving own3d pictures out to your own statements is gay.

Especially unfunny Vietnam ones. I saw a funnier one where they put Gary Glitter in there, I'll have a look for it...

Edit:

That's the one thing the old forums here were great for.. endless epic flame wars and nobody cared!