19. Children Of Bodom - Follow The Reaper (2000)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EtPDm2kaj1c Finnish melodic death experts Children Of Bodom are an acquired taste. If you're not up for dazzling synth shenanigans and guitar vs. keyboard solo face-offs, the Bodom charm will be lost on you. Follow The Reaper brings together the best of this incredibly technical style of metal, based heavily on classical melodies and key structures (and we're talking about proper Mozart-style classical, not Led Zeppelin), powerful choruses and a rasping vocal line carving into each track. It's not warm or terribly inviting to outsiders, but it's not meant to be - Children Of Bodom trades exclusively in frosty Scandinavian metal. As far as melodic death goes, there is an almost clinical precision to these tracks; instruments aren't smashed and defiled, rather plucked and picked like surgical equipment. Guitar solos are insanely quick, the keyboards even more so, twisting around one another at a frightening pace while Alexi Laiho's theatrical snarl cuts in like a knife fight in the dark. Flashy but with the skill to back it up, Follow The Reaper shines like the metal-infused lovechild of power, speed and icy death all in one.
Henry Dowling
Contributor
Game-obsessed since the moment I could twiddle both thumbs independently. Equally enthralled by all the genres of music that your parents warned you about.
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Henry