 
This review is hard for me to not be biased because
Children of Bodom have been my favourite band
for a very long time. I’ve followed them
through a lot of truly amazing albums especially
“Follow the Reaper”, “Hate Crew
Deathroll”, “Are You Dead Yet?”
and 2008’s “Blooddrunk”. Every
single one of those albums have been near enough
flawless. Their latest effort “Relentless
Reckless Forever” whilst being a great album,
it does take a while to grow on you before you
can truly appreciate how good it is because it’s
quite an experimental side of the band.
I have been eagerly awaiting the release and the
hype got really big with all the adverts, the
very promising title and the very attractive album
cover; after all the hype and the build up about
it I was really expecting the best record to have
ever graced the earth, that fact may be influencing
my thoughts because I was expecting more so couldn’t
help but be a little dissapointed but it’s
still a great album.
Album opener “Not my Funeral” has
everything you would expect children of bodom
to put out, stupid amounts of technical guitar
playing and fat chunky breakdown sections with
added thicker sound from the inclusion of the
keyboards and some eeriness chucked in there as
well; however whilst being a good song it’s
not as catchy as COB songs normally are. The drumming
intro to “Shovel Knockout” reminds
me of Deftones song “Around the Fur”
but then kicks into huge metal chaos, this is
more of an experimental song for Bodom I think
trying to pick up the speed to extreme levels
and it pays off.
One thing you cannot say a bad word about is Alexi
Laiho’s musical capabilities with that guitar.
Some of the solos and licks in these songs are
out of this world, another reason why I fell in
love with COB in the first place; however in some
songs they lose their way a bit in songs like
“Ugly” that whilst being skilful and
heavy for the most part it feels like they are
trying to fit too many twists and turns into 1
song, overworked it so to say.
That overworked feeling fits into parts of all
the songs, mostly in “Pussyfoot Miss Suicide”,
“Relentless Reckless Forever” and
“Cry of the Nihilist”. I feel if instead
of putting too much in each song if they took
it and made extra songs the album would have been
truly phenomenal and possibly a contender for
album of the year, whilst stating that the songs
are still good and you can get into them. The
first single “Was it Worth it?” is
my favourite song from the album as it doesn’t
have that rammed feel that the others have its
a genuine showcase of musical talent and catchy
lyrics. I hope they take all this in consideration
for their next album but having said this I still
love it and think it’s great just not on
par with “Blooddrunk” or their other
popular albums.
4/5
Review by James Webb
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