Wanderingblade,
I agree, clean vocals can be a huge pitfall. If someone doesn't know how to sing, you can really tell with clean vocals, and that's why I hate hearing clean vocals in a lot of current melodic death releases. Most death vocalists have shit clean voices and vocal skills. Probably the best clean voice I've heard from a death vocalist is Dan Swano. His cleans are godly, and if all death vocalists sounded as good as him, I wouldn't complain one bit. Unfortunately, nobody comes close, and Anders (while I love his death vox), comes in near the bottom of the barrel. I also hated Stanne's cleans on Projector, but I guess its all completely subjective. Each person has their own taste.
Nephren-Ka,
No, IF have not turned into Limp Bizkit or Korn or whatever, but their supposed use of nu-metal-like riffing is what people are referring to. Personally I can't tell because I don't listen to one shred of nu-metal anyways. R2R does still sound like In Flames, but the new sounds you mention bury everything that I liked about the band. The simple basic chugging rhythm guitar is up front, clean vocals are up front, keyboards are up front, and melodic lead guitars are buried behind everything else. It's almost as if they're thrown the melodic leads in as an afterthought to hook in the old fans, while putting all the new stuff up front to capture a new audience. It's still In Flames, but not an In Flames I care about any longer.
