After Dimmu Borgir with their symphony orchestra, In Flames was probably the biggest name of the day, and thus also had a good spot on the Friday at Wacken.

Just as with the former band, In Flames started out with hiding their stage behind a curtain, but for a very different reason – the band, or at least one guy but I can’t say who, began playing the piano during the Jester’s Door which was used as an intro, and already here we could get a hint of the giant scaffold which took up the entire stage behind it.
The first ‘real’ song played was Cloud Connected, which worked great in getting the crowd going, but still the curtain stayed up, showing an odd video-production of a sort of trance party version of Tetris. The veil was rather thin and semi-transparent, so we could also see the band standing behind it playing, and they were placed up on different levels of the scaffold when doing this – certainly a new and interesting take on opening a concert!
To my surprise, and it was quite a positive one I might add, In Flames decided to stay on the Reroute To Remain album for a while, following Cloud Connected with Trigger, one of my favourites from that very album. At this time the band was back down on the normal stage-floor and we could see that they were trying to bring some class to the show as well by wearing white shirts (you know, the nice kind) and stylish vests, removing them rather far from the general man/woman in the packed audience in front of them. The scaffold and the veil was still up, showing video productions or light-shows from time to time, but the band was now standing in front of it rather than in the middle of it.

In Flames was rocking the True Metal stage rather well, and they kept up the special effects and ideas of the show right until the end where My Sweet Shadow saw a blazing pyro-show light up the night!
Problem was, that rock pretty much stayed on the stage and I for one wasn’t very grabbed. Looking at the crowd over-passes shown on the big screen between the stages I could see that the people in the front were duly enthralled as it should be, but as it was impossible to reach that position due to the amount of people at Wacken combined with the fact that there were other bands I wanted to see as well that day (otherwise I could of course just have camped out in front of the stage the whole day like the truly awesome fans choose to do) I was left to enjoy the from a larger distance, and believe me when I say that I wasn’t the only one in that area who didn’t seem completely convinced. The intensity and the speed was there from the band, but for some reason it just didn’t grab a hold of me like I had hoped it would have. Maybe the fact that Anders Fridén wasn’t really on the top of his game vocally this evening (some people would argue that he never is, but I wouldn’t go as far as that) had something to do with it, maybe it was the distance, or maybe still it was the fact that I was feeling a little bit tipsy at this point of the night. Probably it was a combination of all three and probably some more factors that I haven’t accounted for here – whatever the reason though, it didn’t really work out the way it should have.

I won’t say that the concert was completely without merit however, as the setlist was far better than I would have ever dared to hope; except for several tracks from their two latest givings, A Sense Of Purpose and Sounds Of A Playground Fading, an unhealthily large portion of the nights songs were taken from the aforementioned Reroute To Remain album, the very album that really got me hooked on the band and to this day stands as my favourite!
Old timey fans didn’t have much to be happy about though, as only a single song from before this album got through the needles eye and onto the setlist – the quite excellent Only For The Weak from Clayman. The lack of more old material might have been a further reason of discontent now that I think about it...

At the end of the night, I do applaud large parts of the setlist and In Flames ingenuity in stage-props, but none of it made up for the lacking spirit I’m afraid. This will not be a show I’ll remember, for several reasons as you might have understood.

Setlist:

Jester’s Door
Cloud Connected
Trigger
Where The Dead Ships Dwell
Only For The Weak
Reroute To Remain
Crawl Through Knives
Delight And Angers
The Quiet Place
The Chosen Pessimist
Fear Is The Weakness
Alias
The Mirror’s Truth
System
Deliver Us
Take This Life
My Sweet Shadow