You saying vocals/lyrics don't count is hands down the gayest thing you ever said in my book.
I'll now proceed to tear apart every point you make.
Why do you think emo music exists? Oh maybe because the vocals/lyrics are that gay.
This is where I point out that actual emo sounds nothing like what you call emo and is actually pretty good. Check out Rites Of Spring. What you call emo (MCR, Fall Out Boy, etc) is goth-pop. That's based on music, not vocals. Atreyu use screaming but still fit in this.
One of the biggest thing people criticize about music is vocals. There's a reason why people call Anders an emo retard now.
And your point is?
What the fuck do you expect In Flames to be called if they start rapping? If that happened it would no doubt finally push it into the "nu metal" catagory.
If the MUSIC became more rhythmic, yeah. If he was rapping over The Chosen Pessimist it would be exactly what it is (melodic alternative metal), but way more annoying. There's a lot of slam death that has entirely rhythmic rappish vocals. But is it rap-slam? No. It's slam death. It's a specific style of slam death called wigger slam, but that's another story.
For the Reroute ASOP thing...
Reroute has a bunch of songs that they forget?
What the fuck about Come Clarity and STYE?
They don't play obscure tracks from those anymore.
Um. Yeah. But here it's more obvious because they're all at the end. Tracks 8 onwards could just not exist and no one would care. Also because there's a massive drop in quality. The first couple songs are okay, but then it just gets astoundingly shitty.
They're just playing up ASOP cause it's their new album, it's the tour for that album, and they have a boner for their album because "our newest album is the best" runs through their heads each time they release a new album.
Good god! No one's ever done that before. I can't believe they'd do that!
Reroute was more diverse than ASOP. The songs didn't fucking sound like one another like ASOP does.
Aside from the fact where the songs actually sound identical due to the shit production they actually sound way less distinct. There's a couple (Trigger, Cloud Connected) that are distinguishable and the rest all have the same structure. ASOP uses more varied song and riff structure.
As for the production. I don't see the gold where you're pointing at. Guitar tone sounds boring and bland. Bad EQ job.
Reroute was muddy but the guitar tone fit the music. I love the melody tone in Reroute to Remain.
No. It's a shitty production job.
ASOP just sounds so boring.
I like some riffs on the album but god fucking damn the guitar tone.
I like the riff on Alias where they go acoustic, but when they switched into electric it was a boner killer. That's how much I don't like the tone.
And really, it just doesn't fit In Flames. It sounds unmetal. Whatever.
You probably should accept that In Flames are barely metal at this point.
And the sound is really good. It's undeniably a really good production job.
One man's shit is another man's gold. You enjoy ASOP, but I fucking hate 80% of it.
But you still want to argue about it...