children of bodom relentless reckless forever

Released: 08 March 2011 Label: Spinefarm UK

Children of Bodom return with their seventh full-length studio release and it's a corker! Relentless Reckless Forever is a short album but they do cover a lot of ground musically speaking, and most of it at a rather brisk pace.

Jagged, complex riffs interplay with keyboard flourishes throughout, with staccato chugging and melodically slanted choruses to the fore, making for quite a catchy experience, and there's also plenty in the way of musical shade and variation going on crammed into the brief playing time, to make it a rewarding listening experience.

Not My Funeral gets everything off to a rip-roaring start, with edgy, aggressive riffing, and an eye on melodic progression, as guitarist and mainman Alex Laiho certainly knows how to shred. Equalling him, is the keyboard soloing which plays a kind of hide 'n' seek with the lead guitar.

Almost in Dream Theater territory, shudder, but thankfully they keep it brief and pretty classy, without indulging themselves too much in show-off musical wankery!

Shovel Knockout throws out riffs quick and fast, alternating between aggression and carefully placed contrasting melodic interludes. Roundtrip to Hell and Back, is a slightly slower track, with a bit more straightforward chugging but still the relentless amount of riffage and elaboration continues every few bars, with good use of changing time signatures.

The daft song titles continue with Pussyfoot Miss Suicide which has some really cool and intricate walking-note riffs.

The title track, Reckless, Relentless Forever, is pretty thrashy with ascending, edgy melodies but with its musical structure harking back to Metal's blues based guitar roots. The first single too, Was It Worth It? also demonstrates Bodom's musical knowledge with a very bluesy solo that takes time to build into a pure shred! The track has an accompanying Skate-board themed video on youtube now, and it's a catchy, party metal track, with huge, friendly sounding chord progressions.

Ugly has the fastest intro, and a tremolo picked main riff, string skipping and stop start aprpeggiations throughout. The keyboard sound reminds me of the style of Goblin, the Italian prog band that so often featured in the films of Dario Argento. Crossing horror movie music with speed metal has to be a winner in my book! The solo is a mix of old school string bends and speed metal, and its possibly my fave tune on an album littered with musical highlights.

Cry of the Nihilist is a chugging stop / start, frenetic number with a brilliant speed-gallop bridge and the album ends with the brisk NorthPole Throwdown, the shortest and sharpest track, although it does have a little guitar riff in there that sounds unfortunately like the original theme to Casualty at times!

It's a return to form for the Finns after a couple of releases that seemed a tad pedestrian for Bodom. While bold, musically extravagant and full of jokily humorous song titles, that indicates a band having a lot of fun and not taking things too seriously, it is a bit too dry and clinical in the mix for my taste – the guitars need more meat on them – but I think that about everything pretty much!

I have to say though overall that Children of Bodom are back on form after a few mediocre releases by their standards, and this is an energetic hit of speedy melodic noise.

by Steven Hargraves