Sounds of a Playground Fading

Since helping define the "Gothenburg sound" of melodic death metal in the '90s, In Flames has had quite an interesting musical journey. Since the early '00s, they've been moving towards a more accessible, alternative metal style, but I wouldn't say they're selling out--they've produced some classic songs lately and I wasquite excited to hear their new album, Sounds of a Playground Fading, yesterday.

The album is the band's first since the unfortunate departure of founding member, songwriter, and guitarist Jesper Strömblad. (Portnoy, Khan, and Strömblad--2010 was a sad year in metal) Minus his creative power, the band continues unabated in its quest to combine the sound it helped define with introspective lyrics and a cleaner sound. The frantic pace at which the band has been reinventing itself recently slows, but doesn't stop and the album has some interesting moments on par with A Sense of Purpose's "The Chosen Pessimist"--along with In Flames' usual melodeath fury.

The album opens with a lone, quiet guitar intro on the title track before exploding into a metal tour de force that shows just how capable In Flames is of rocking your socks off without their founder. After that, it has no shortage of songs that exemplify, though perhaps don't really advance, In Flames' modern style--a thickly layered sound, twin-guitar harmonies that alternate between being textural and taking center stage with awesome riffs, and Anders Friden, who alternates between screaming and singing and goes just about everywhere in between. "Deliver Us", "Darker Times", and "Where the Dead Ships Dwell" all fall in this camp.  Meanwhile, "The Puzzle" and "Enter Tragedy" stand out as the heavy songs of the album, with frantic tempos, blast beats, and especially brutal guitars. "The Puzzle" and "All for Me" both slow down in the middle for a bit of a break. "Fear Is the Weakness", being especially melodic, falls on the other side of the spectrum of typical In Flames songs.

But this album certainly contains the band's trend of having some "interesting" songs on each album. "Jester's Door" sounds like a condensed version of "The Chosen Pessimist", starting as a spoken word song with minimal instrumentation before a loud, almost industrial-sounding outro. It's more a break from the longer songs. "The Attic" is more interesting and stands more on its own. Friden half-sings, half-whispers lyrics that sound like the plot of a mystery/horror movie through the eyes of the main characters with the rest of the band playing considerably more low-key. Very cool song. "Ropes" features especially a lot of clean singing (reminding you how Swedish the band is), sounding a bit like modern prog metal at times. "A New Dawn" is even more proggy, clocking in at almost six minutes and switching between loud melodeath and soft sections several times. I made a note that the ending is "epic". I'd love to see In Flames explore this angle more in the future. The album closer, "Liberation" is the closest thing to a ballad the band has done yet, but is quite enjoyable unless you don't like the band's commerical direction, in which case you should probably just relisten to Colony instead.

Overall, I'd give this album 4/5, with room to grow. Much of it is familiar territory, which fails to be terribly memorable, good as the execution is. The songs that stand out are the really interesting ones, and I hope In Flames continues this experimentation on later releases. An admirable effort considering the recent loss of the founder.