I think I missed this band’s big moment in the limelight. By the time I became aware of underground metal in any fashion, they’d already received a lot of flak for not playing the same style of vaguely neoclassical themed pop melodeath that they started their career with, and I steered my musical inquiries away. Apparently they’ve metamorphosed into some sort of bizarre fusion of such with overt Pantera style groove party rock, which sounds like an obvious awful, misguided idea that even the more mainstream-leaning metalheads would reject out of hand. That I Worship Chaos often juxtaposes various styles of former pop metal tends to support this hypothesis.

Underneath everything it carelessly throws at the listener, I Worship Chaos is not very artfully written. Like most pop music, it’s vocally driven, and like most pop music that adopts metal technique and aesthetics, the vocals are monotonous; in this case, they’re locked into a mid-range shriek with little in the way of timbral or rhythmic variation. The other band members are aren’t shackled to the same degree, so they take advantage of it by performing riffs and patterns reminiscent of many other previously commercially successful subgenres. Nuclear Blast probably has it down to a science – “Add a long breakdown here, and some stop-start riffing in the middle of this one song, and maybe one noisy solo after that, and we’ll earn 38% more tour ticket sales per album purchase” levels of formula that don’t exactly make for intelligent songwriting.

As a reader, you’re probably not looking for what is essentially a carnival of warmed over old pop metal and probably would avoid Children of Bodom’s latest even without our criticism. However, I Worship Chaos also fails in comparison to other recent pop metal albums. The fact it throws so many cliches at the listener (like rotting fruit) is bad enough, but the brickwalled production won’t do it any favors, either. Although it’s far from the worst example of such I’ve heard recently, the fact that the band attempts to have some dynamics (even if only by alternating obvious fast songs with obvious ballads) renders it unfitting. It does pass the major label litmus test of being otherwise competently performed and produced, but skilled musicians playing banal parts have never been on the menu here at DMU, and such does not save the band members from my displeasure.

Tags: 2015, carnival music, children of bodom, i worship chaos, modern metal, power metal