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In Flames: Road Worn and Weary By Peter Atkinson, Contributor Tuesday, September 10, 2002 @ 12:05 AM
In Flames’ much-anticipated sixth album Reroute To Remain is due to drop on Sept. 3rd. It very well could see the Gothenburg-based quintet make the kind of mainstream impact in the states that is has had in Europe and Japan, where it is legitimate stars. The buzz around In Flames has been building steadily in the states since the band finally started touring here after 1999’s Colony. The well-received Clayman and even more extensive touring for it here made people even outside the metal underground sit up and take notice.
Reroute certainly will have a good head of steam behind it when it released, thanks to the band’s smash spring tour with Iced Earth and the current trek into some really big venues with Slayer. The album, however, already is the source of some controversy -- and has been for months -- with various sources claiming through the usual rumor mills that In Flames is making a deliberate stab at mass appeal in America by either shifting into nu-metal mode or making a brazenly commercial album.
It’s all a load of shit, of course, but Friden and company [guitarist Jesper Stromblad and Bjorn Gelotte, bassist Peter Iwers and drummer Daniel Svensson] are weary of refuting rumors about an album almost no one has heard at this point. Reroute may have added melody and more direct songs, but In Flames is as heavy and vicious as ever. There’s just greater depth and variety – and if that makes the album more commercially acceptable, so be it.
From his seat on the tour bus couch, Friden had the following to say about Reroute, rumor mongering, Sept. 11th, mortality and Slay-er! Slay-er!
KNAC.COM: I take it you haven’t gotten outside to enjoy our lovely August weather? Anders Friden: No, not today, I woke up just a half hour ago. We played last night in Worcester, the Palladium, and it was a long drive. Everyone is telling me how hot it is out there. KNAC.COM: You’ll definitely know you’re not in Sweden anymore. Friden: [laughs] I’ll stay in here where it’s air conditioned, that feels a little bit more like home.
Friden: It’s going really good, I would say. We heard everything going into this about people getting booed off the stage to getting things thrown at you. Stuff like that. But so far, it’s been going way better than we expected. KNAC.COM: Have you guys gotten the Slay-er! Slay-er! salute most of their opening bands get? Friden: Some, of course, but we don’t pay too much attention. In between the sets there is always people going “Slay-er! Slay-er!” You expect to hear that. But in between our songs we haven’t been hearing it, so that’s a good sign. If everybody was doing that in between the songs, that would make us feel really bad. But if it’s just a few, then it doesn’t matter. KNAC.COM: I’ve read a couple reviews of the tour, and everyone mentions your white uniforms. Friden: [laughs] With metal, everything is about being black and dark and this and that, and we’re just trying to have some fun with that. We have done a couple of tours where we’ve had uniforms or wore different colors, I wore red, I had a white shirt and tie, stuff like that, just to be a bit different than everything else. We just like to look nice, we don’t have to wear metal shirts and just stand there and headbang. You can see that anywhere. KNAC.COM: I was flying out to Denver last week and Tom Araya was on my connecting flight from Dallas, where he lives, Obviously they’ve been getting some days off? Friden: They do have some days offs, but we really don’t. We had to schedule some headline shows in between so we can afford to do this tour and maybe even make a little money. We want to live okay and we don’t want to travel in a van, then you get all sick of each other and just get sick period. It stinks bad enough on this fucking thing. To be able to afford the bus and hotels like we’re staying in tomorrow in Cleveland we have to play, so time off is not something we’ve seen a lot of on this tour. KNAC.COM: Are you going to be able to get home between when this tour is done and the next one starts? Friden: No, we are here for two months straight. When this tour is over, we start the next one in San Francisco, so this (the bus) will be our home for two months. KNAC.COM: And then what happens? Friden: We fly home to Europe, we’re home for five days then the European tour starts and we’re supposed to go to South America, but it seems that that has been postponed to early next year. So we get a little break in between and then we go to Korea, Taiwan and Japan. Before there wasn’t going to be any break until Christmas, now it’s kind of nice that we go some kind of break. Until summer I guess we’ll be pretty much on the road. And then there’s the festivals in Europe, after that then we’ll see what happens. 
KNAC.COM: How much of the new record are you doing, since you only have 30 minutes? Friden: Two songs, we try to do. At least. There is a lot of people who haven’t heard us before so they don’t know if it’s new or an old song. And we want to get the new songs in the set so when we’re doing our own shows we’ve got any bugs worked out. KNAC.COM: Do people seem to be into you, or are they just not being openly hostile? Friden: I think we’ve been making a good impact, so we’re pretty happy with how we’ve been received so far. And we have a lot of people coming up to us and saying, “We haven’t heard you before, but what you do is really good.” So that’s the whole point of this tour, to get our name our to a wider audience and spread it. Right we’re still small, at least here, kind of between the underground and on the way up. Hopefully it will keep going up. KNAC.COM: There seems to be quite a buzz about the new album here. Friden: That’s great, because it’s a big, big market and we are just in the beginnings. We don’t see too much about our new record, except what we pick up on the road. It’s hard to stay tuned into what’s going on in the world when you’re traveling all the time, but from what I can gather there seems to be quite a bit of talk about it, which is cool. Really we are something new that people haven’t heard before, even though this band has been around for quite some time. The main metal audience, those people who do not pay much attention to the underground, haven’t heard us before or heard this type of music before, so I think there is a place for a band like us. KNAC.COM: You definitely do straddle that line between underground, extreme metal and more commercial metal. Friden: I think so. We can be very aggressive and play really heavy and fast, and my vocals might be a bit rough for some people, but there’s a lot of melody in our songs and plenty of riffs you can bang your head to. I don’t know if it’s going get us on the radio, but I don’t think it will scare people away either. KNAC.COM: Where did all the “nu-metal” rumors start? Friden: I don’t know. Maybe when we toured with Slipknot. Someone said to his friend who said that same thing and then the rumors spread. Go and just listen to the album. Why would we ever go in that direction? In Flames has a history since ’92, the first album was in ’94, way before this nu-metal thing. Why would we all of a sudden just change? KNAC.COM: All it takes is some dipshit with e-mail, and all of a sudden you have… Even if you really haven’t. Friden: Yeah, exactly. You get tired of the whole thing, but I guess that’s part of getting a bit more known around. We were kind of away from that rumor thing before because we were a smaller band, but now people pay attention. We laugh at most of the stuff anyway. KNAC.COM: Are you ready to make the step up from the underground? Friden: It doesn’t bother me, I can take that step any day. I want to spread our music to as many people as possible, that’s why we do this, that’s why we tour. If I would be happy being home playing once a month in my garage, I would do that, but I want to get my music out to the people. 
KNAC.COM: Are you happy with the progress the band has made, especially over the last couple years? Friden: Yeah, we work hard. Harder than most of the bands that come from Sweden or play our type of music. We tour a lot. This is quite a new market for us, we really enjoy it and I think it works. It’s a good challenge for us because we’ve done quite well in Europe and Japan, but if you really want to consider yourselves a successful band, you have to make an impact in the states. We’ve taken small steps, so that we don’t lose our feet from the ground, so to speak. We don’t get bigheaded or whatever, we’re still the same people. And by the same token we haven’t set ourselves up for a big fall. We’d like to think this new record is going to do well, but if it doesn’t we’ll keep right on going. KNAC.COM: Can Nuclear Blast handle things now that it seems like you could really take off. Friden: We’ll see now. KNAC.COM: This will be the big test? Friden: Yeah. This is the last album [under our contract with them] as well, so we’ll see what happens. It could be interesting. KNAC.COM: Have bigger labels approached you? Friden: They could have, but I don’t want to talk about it at all because we are still on Nuclear Blast and they are our label. And they’ve done a good job so far. They are a small label, but we’ve grown together. KNAC.COM: All I’ve heard from Reroute is the four-track advance teaser CD. Is it representative of the album as a whole, one song to fit each type of mood? Friden: Yeah, you could say that. I decided which songs were supposed to be there. There’s one fast, one slow, one in-between and one typical In Flames song, so yeah I think it represents it pretty good. KNAC.COM: There does seem to be some more melody and the songs are a bit simpler. Friden: It’s got more depth. I enjoy the album, I’m really proud of it. I don’t know if it’s simpler, because the melodies are more sophisticated. But we’ve gotten away from the hundred millions riffs in one song. We’d rather have good, short memorable songs that have a more traditional pop structure. Catchy songs, but still keep whatever is In Flames, whether that means the aggression or the guitar tradeoffs or the heaviness. And I believe we’ve succeeded in that way. It sounds like In Flames, but it is new in a way. There’s more catchy choruses and a bit more clean singing, but it’s still power metal songs. Vocal-wise it’s still harsh and we’re still a very heavy band. KNAC.COM: The album’s subtitle is “14 Songs of Conscious Madness.” What are we supposed to make of that? 
Friden: I don’t know, I’m insane. It should be conscious insanity. I’m aware that I’m a little bit stupid [laughs], insane. But it’s good for me, it takes me somewhere and as long as we can keep it under control it’s okay. You can do whatever you want with it, that’s what I do with my lyrics anyway. I write personal lyrics, but I write it in such a way that everyone can interpret their own feelings and their own ideas about what it’s about.
KNAC.COM: Is there an underlying theme to it, are the songs interconnected? Friden: No, it’s just me complaining about this and that [laughs]. KNAC.COM: What is some of “this and that”? Friden: It could be people that I meet and things that I feel and things that I think about and relationships between me and other people. Love, disaster, all this, normal things that people think about, but I try to write it in an interesting way so it’s not just really, really simple. KNAC.COM: Since the music comes from some different angles this time, did you approach things any differently from a lyrical standpoint? Friden: I guess it’s a bit more happy, it’s not as dark as before. KNAC.COM: Really, despite the whole insanity thing? Friden: Yeah, I’m a happier person now. Otherwise it’s pretty much the same. I met a wonderful woman, that’s why. I got out from a self-destructive relationship, so I see the light at the end of the tunnel, so to speak, and that helps a lot. But my lyrics did reflect the old relationship a lot, that’s where a lot of the insanity comes into play. Because there are a lot of things to talk about, a lot of things to dissect before I feel I can get it out of the system. It’s easy to write about bad relationships, it’s hard to write happy songs. It’s really hard. But that’s how people are. It’s easier to complain about stuff than say “fuck, you’re a really good guy” or “you’re a really good girl.” Which is kind of stupid, I think. But that’s part of being human, for better or worse. [The tour bus starts moving, taking a lap on the block around the club. The U.S. Capital dome commands the skyline less than a mile away, but when we pull back the bus window curtains, all we see is the industrial slagheap that is Southeast D.C. So much for sightseeing.] KNAC.COM: Did you guys see any of the new truck-bomb proofing, blocked-off streets, security checkpoints or nuclear material detectors when you came through town? The Congressional office buildings that were closed because of the anthrax letters are less than a mile from here, and the Pentagon is just over there [I point west] -- so things are a little tense around here. Friden: No I haven’t seen any of that. And now I’m not so sure I want to! [laughs] KNAC.COM: After Sept. 11, were things much different where you live. Was there a heightened sense of security? Friden: We have had these politics for a long, long time, even though it’s a total lie, that we are kind of independent, we stand in the middle. But the embassy, everything like that was shut off for days and there were anthrax threats there, too. People were sending stuff to our government. It’s weird, it’s so strange because you really do feel like you’ve got to watch your back now. 
KNAC.COM: What were you doing when the attacks happened? Friden: We were actually writing our album at the time, so we were renting this house. My girlfriend called me while we were going to buy beer, of course [laughs], actually we were on our way back, and she says that an airplane flew into one of the twin towers and we were like “what the fuck.” We were close to the house where we were practicing, so we ran straight in and turned on the TV. Ten minutes later the other plane hit the second tower [makes explosion noise] and then it was scary. We were watching CNN all day long, we couldn’t do anything that day. I guess it affects everybody in one way or another. Even thought it’s so far away from where we come from, little Sweden, I know a person that died in the Trade Center. It was a classmate to my little brother, he used to come from the same neighborhood that we came from. That was kind of scary. KNAC.COM: Shows what a small world it really is. Friden: Exactly. The whole thing also affected the way we wrote the album, and my lyrics. You should take the opportunity right now to live your life. You don’t know what can happen around the corner, you should just enjoy the time that you have. KNAC.COM: Because you never know … Friden: No, you really don’t. Take care of each other -- we are so self-destructive, it’s very sad to see. We’re here on borrowed time and people just kill each other. It just doesn’t make any sense. (Photos from InFlames.com)
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One more show. One more bus ride. And then, finally, there’ll be a day off for Swedish power metallers In Flames. Comfy hotel beds. Clean showers. A pool! A chance to spend one night away from the reeking bus that has been their home for two solid weeks -- if only their road managers can find a place that can accommodate said bus. 