Follow the Reaper

Children of Bodom's third album brought a mixed bag to the table in its musicianship, performance, and songwriting. Though it offered a great deal of memorable riffs and melodies in almost every song, it also held its fair share of convoluted indecisiveness, especially on the latter half of the album, as well as what one might deduce as musical laziness.

Don't get the wrong message; this album absolutely provided the listener with chilling moments. In fact, the most consistently positive musical theme on the release are the lead guitar catch phrases, which begin songs like "Children of Decadence" and "Hate Me!", where the opening guitar lines really helps the song become alive. Additionally, in the songs "Mask of Sanity" and "Taste of My Scythe", the lead guitar is instrumentally complimented by the use of synthesizers, often imitating dulcimers, to take the place of the guitars in order to add some well-needed and well-taken variety throughout the course of the album. Alongside the introductory drum pattern and second-interval keyboard pattern on "Hate Me!", the implementation of these various instrumental sources grants the entire album the sense of eeriness desired from this band's musical and lyrical style. Likewise, this is seen in the orchestration of the opening track "Follow the Reaper". The rhythm guitars also had their fair share of moments to open other songs: "Follow the Reaper", "Bodom After Midnight", "Northern Comfort", and "Kissing the Shadows". The creativity of the last one listed, however, is not quite to the same degree as the others. If there's one consistent plus to this album though, it is the track openings.

"Children of Decadence" has to be the best song on the album, but unfortunately, that's only because what it managed to do right was everything that most of the rest of this album failed to do. It not only gripped its listeners with the first note, but it built upon the main musical themes it introduced in the beginning over the course of the rest of the song. Contrary to songs like "Taste of My Scythe" and "Northern Comfort", the songwriting template is explicitly laid out and each subsequent theme is revisited numerous times in a sequential fashion, but not so much as to become tedious or repetitive. Rather, each segment of the song complements the previous and the upcoming almost perfectly.

In contrast, "Follow the Reaper" bears stark difference to the songwriting structure seen in "Children of Decadence" and also exemplifies the indecisiveness of the rest of the album. This song may come in second place despite its unclear structure because it has a certain fluidity to it. While tracks 5-9 (with the exception of "Hate Me!") follow the same sort of relaxed, fluid pattern, the approach the band tries to make falls short because the segments either do not effectively bond to make a good song or are too convoluted and seem to be superficially and non-creatively complex just to fill time.

This leads to another issue with the album: lazy songwriting. Sometimes it's self-evident when a band just seems to be making up its guitar solos as it goes. Even in portions of "Children of Decadence" this can be seen, where the guitars are just mindless filler, but especially this is found true in "Kissing the Shadows", "Mask of Sanity", and "Taste of My Scythe", the first listed song having an over-glorified outro solo which ends the album on a very low note, to its own dismay. The primary exceptions to this rule are in "Follow the Reaper", where the rampant soloing actually has intent and purpose to itself, and in "Everytime I Die" which is the outlier to almost every conceivable theme in the album (which could be argued as a good thing). This song is the slow chugging piece whose bridge solo is reminiscent of some classic hard rock in its instilling of goosebumps. It's nothing spectacular, but it flips the bill.

The vocalist is competent, to say the least, but when he tries to turn his hard vocals into growling/singing, it becomes the closest thing you'll find to Finnish metalcore vocals.

In place of relying on discombobulated soloing and riffing, some of the melodies in songs like "Mask of Sanity" with its groovy guitars following the dulcimer intro, and "Taste of My Scythe" in its mainline soprano guitar, could have used some revisiting much to their improvement. As I mentioned before, every song had its awesome moments, but as a whole, this album's contents failed to relay those creative, innovative, and memorable elements to the whole 38 minutes.