I've had a tumultuous relationship with Bodom over the years. They're another band I've wound up consistently covering throughout my reviewing career without really doing so intentionally, mostly because they were just simply one of my favorite bands in high school, and due to my listening habits at the time, I binged so much of their material from 03-07 that I could probably play every song on every instrument from memory at this point, and I have fat sausage fingers and have never even seen a drumset in real life. We all know how magical they were back when they were basically just Nightwish on fast forward with a vocalist who had no idea how to sing/scream/breathe and the worst lyrics ever written, floating by almost entirely on insane shredding and unmatched charisma. We all know how bad they were when they dropped the melodic power metalisms more and more and started just becoming bland ass melodeath with occasional keys and nutso soloing. We all know everything about them at this point, they're one of the more popular metal bands in the mainstream and anybody with the slightest awareness of where metal is currently knows who they are and what they're about. So how are they faring nowadays after the surprisingly decent Halo of Blood in 2013?
Ehhhhh.
I Worship Chaos is basically just a slightly better counterpart to the totally irrelevant Relentless Reckless Forever, just with some much needed aggression that that release was sorely lacking. Halo of Blood was a distinct and obvious throwback to their more melodic beginnings, acting as something of a hypothetical midpoint between Follow the Reaper (one of my all time favorite albums, if you recall) and Hate Crew Deathroll. I Worship Chaos finds itself positioned one black key further down the piano of their release history, nestled neatly between Hate Crew and Are You Dead Yet?, being a more heavily melodeath influenced album than the former but still retaining some of the overt melodicism that the latter had excised in 2005.
Now, I don't necessarily hate either of those two albums. I think Hate Crew is great and AYDY at the very least starts strong with three fun songs before becoming a boring slog, and I think this one's thematic counterparts translate basically 1:1 in terms of quality. It's got three great songs hidden among a bunch of inconsequential, effortless nonsense. "I Hurt" is a fine opener, with some nice hooks and a damn catchy chorus riff (that "I AM DOMINANT" part is one of the most entertaining things they've done in ages), "Horns" is mad aggressive and sounds straight out of 2003, replete with some mindbending fret/keyboard acrobatics, and the title track is one of the best songs they've written in years, again sounding like something that would've been right at home on Hate Crew with how pummeling and insane it is. The keys remain prominent and the hooks are strong as hell, even the chorus is awesome, sounding like it was tailor made for the live arena. I can't stress enough that this is exactly what Bodom is so fucking good at. Clearly their power metal based beginnings are long gone, but when they fully embrace the melodeath style and filter it through the songwriting lens of a rabid wolf who happens to have human fingers and be really good at guitar, they can craft some seriously excellent stuff.
The problem arises with the rest of the album, as it flip flops between those god awful slow songs they insist on shoehorning into every album ever since "Angels Don't Kill" somehow became a fan favorite (see: "Prayer for the Afflicted" and "All for Nothing") and near-totally irrelevant white noise that sounds like it was written in an afternoon ("Hold Your Tongue", "Morrigan", "Suicide Bomber", etc). "All for Nothing" stands out in the worst way, potentially being the most teeth-grittingly terrible song the band ever released, attempting to be some sort of unholy power ballad that awkwardly transitions between quiet piano parts with Alexi just whispering like Jonathon Davis since he can't sing and bland plodding non-riffs that go nowhere at all. Not even the wind-in-your-hair epic dueling solos that carry the song out can save this trainwreck, it's such an awful attempt at saccharine emotion that falls so flat that it's practically invisible when viewed from the side. I hate this song and I hate anybody who likes it. Even the otherwise solid "Widdershins" tends to be forgotten by me simply because it follows this disaster and I just want the fucking album to end already.
There aren't a whole lot of stylistic differences between the good songs and the lame ones, so it really just showcases the difference in level of songwriting. "I Worship Chaos" is a total mess of unconnected ideas but they're all good ideas so it winds up being a somewhat anarchic whizbang avalanche of raditude, while "Suicide Bomber" is singularly focused in being keyboard heavy melodeath but manages to limp through the entire runtime without one single memorable riff or melody. Bodom is showing themselves to be an odd enigma who routinely excels when they don't really know what they're doing. The more they focus on crafting songs around a unified whole, the more they find themselves following the rules and releasing inconsequential boredom. When they just sorta say "fuck it" and go balls to the wall with no restraint or clear direction, they wind up gutting out memorable confetti farts of glitter and shrapnel. That's what made the first four albums so special, they were just terminal alcoholics who were really good at their instruments so they flailed around aimlessly and wound up wrecking everything in their path with flair and aplomb.
The problem with Bodom nowadays isn't that they used to be great, because that would be unfair to hold I Worship Chaos in lower regard simply because Hatebreeder is so much better. The problem is that an album like this showcases the difference between a good example of the style (specifically Hate Crew Deathroll since it adds so much heaviness to their original sound and has always sort of been the template for everything afterwards) and a mediocre example of the style (this album and most of the ones preceding it, with the exception of its immediate predecessor, which still holds up). The elements are there, but the final product is just... wrong somehow. I don't want to say it's undercooked, because they've definitely been around long enough to know what they're doing and have a solid idea of what they want to do, and I don't want to say it's overcooked because it's somehow still unrefined and it doesn't suffer from overproduction or too many ideas or anything. It's a very "medium" album. It's not rare and it's certainly not well done.
RATING: 48%
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