Children of Bodom played one of the most insane shows I’ve seen yet at Summit Music Hall on March 22 in Denver. Alexi Laiho came out seeming relaxed and positive as he took the stage and quickly ripped into his set. The good opening bands of Wolfheart and Swallow the Sun were both very accomplished esoteric metal from Finland who offered a great chance to see talented bands that are obscure in America but very musically accomplished. The audience was appreciative, but it was hard to anticipate what would come next as the headliners took the stage. From virtually the first note, the room went insane with energy and the entire crowd was one pushing mass. The show had the most beautiful and kinetic energy I’ve seen at a metal show yet. The whole audience was shoved around from all directions due to the circulating mosh pit behind me, but everyone was totally friendly. The audience just loved the band, but no one was safe. People looked out for each other pretty well, and the love for the band was overwhelming.
Hanging on at the front, the only way anyone in the first two rows could stay up there was by holding onto the railing as people slammed in from behind all night. Crowd surfers were flying overhead in short order, and the continual dance of metal horns in the air was unrelenting. Alexi seemed genuinely appreciative, and it was a happy but intense pure metal show from Children of Bodom. Everyone was nice and was letting other people know they weren’t trying to push but that the whole crowd was moving. The people who went into the pit at the middle said it was friendly but incredibly busy, and the band responded with surprise and delight as they played even more intensely and paused frequently between songs to thank people for being so serious about the show. Then they would erupt into still more thunder. Music has a beautiful ability to create its own world and to leave normal perception behind, and for a band that writes occult themed songs with some regularity, the sheer energy and odd movement of the audience was as close to supernatural as it can get. I got insane looks and compliments when I took out my camera for a couple of brief minute long gaps when no crowd surfers were on my head and when the continual chaos seemed stable enough with who was leveraged around me to actually be able to hold my camera and grab a few shots of Alexi.
It was definitely a night for pure metal appreciation, and a lot of people who like obscure extreme metal showed up, especially fans of metal from the Nordic countries. Children of Bodom are supporting their new album Hexed, and it is a more complex and layered album than the last. Where I Worship Chaos was a successful and fast death metal album, Hexed has brought out the melody Alexi is capable of on his guitar much more, with whirling and twisting sounds capturing a vision of chaos that seems true and beautiful. Some of the spinning and whirling sounds with intense rhythm are hard to achieve and offer a strong songwriting showcase to go along with the great technical playing the band is known for. Both are very good albums, but the previous one seemed a little more in the direction of accessibility, as though the band summed up it’s long history with somewhat direct songs, while Hexed is esoteric to its core and should appeal to hardcore fans of the band. It is likely closer to capturing Alexi’s vision as it takes the twisted sound that has been around in Children of Bodom albums for some time and amplifies that to beautiful and strange sonic contortions. The addition of a new second guitarist helps to create this as the two instruments play next to each other in beautiful twisting sets of melodies, with of course Alexi’s melodic sweeping attacks holding the lead.
The set was filled with a few of the new songs and several classics, including songs from Alexi’s favorite Hate Crew Deathroll, a nice way to tie their past to the band’s present after a little more than 20 years. Much of the beauty of the performance though was the way the choice of classic COB songs amplified the lovely twisted sounds of Hexed. It is clearly using motifs that have always been part of the band’s repertoire, but it places heavy emphasis on those musical passages of odd contorting instruments that become something like a chaotic surface from which Alexi’s guitar is able to soar, rising above with melody alongside the keyboard and then crashing back down into the pit of chaos the rhythm section is driving for him. Much of the attraction to Children of Bodom is in the way that they are able to balance aggression with extravagant beauty. Alexi is one of the world’s best guitarists, and he conjures sounds from his instrument with beautiful melody and sometimes classical sensibility while his tempo can reach insane speeds that push metal hard but don’t lose the amazing variation in his sounds. It is hard to find a guitarist who grinds out such a fierce attack with beautiful melody and artful tonal variations in the instrument. The result is a powerful dance of beauty and chaos, something that seems to capture the heart of what heavy metal is capable of.
The keyboard is inspiring and worthy of the prominence symphonic metal bands give to the instrument in contrast to the rarity of seeing it in a melodic death metal band like this, but it especially serves as a backdrop to Alexi’s guitar, like glimmers of light happening as the venue erupts. So the result is a very balanced and aggressive sound that is kinetic the way only death metal can be. The Hexed album is a worthy successor to the intense I Worship Chaos. Both albums are pure melodic death metal, but like many great bands, this is really just a slight adjustment of emphasis out of the palette of sounds and styles they’ve always used. The whole album is strong and has the bizarre twisted sound throughout as the two guitars play against each other, and circular beats pour out of the drums, but Under Grass and Clover and Hecate’s Nightmare are personal favorites. The former got played at the Summit, and the audience went insane, but there was also great love shown for the band’s earlier songs that were in the setlist. The new album opens with another very good song that has been a single and was also played that night, This Road. Compared with earlier albums, the lyrics are a bit clearer in intent, and Alexi has a lot to say besides yelling alongside his guitar. He captures a very confused world of angst and struggle that is in discord with seeking out harmony in one’s life. He sings, “Faceless, dreary soul, like a bottomless black hole. Your future is bleak. My past is unknown. Don’t leave me behind. Just leave me alone.” It is a somewhat remarkable portrayal of a fractured and twisted world that fits the guitar chaos with its search for beauty in melody very well. The prominent twisting sound is also found on earlier albums, but it’s clarified here and seems to have a real trajectory.
Alexi is one of the best guitarists in the world. This comes through impressively enough on every Children of Bodom album, but in person and live the experience is far more powerful and ecstatic, and this show was even better than the one they played at the same venue two years before. His solos demonstrate beauty even while the audience is insanely being shoved all over the venue. The second guitarist gives consistency to the songs while Alexi can fly off in wild directions and truly capture chaos in sound. Heavy metal is a powerful and broad genre with seemingly endless sub-types, but Children of Bodom is among the most artistic and the best of that. They unify the insane aggression of death metal with beautiful melodies, and while melodic death metal has many great purveyors, this is as excellent as it gets. The lyrics are very focused on an ecstatic release of burdens that matches Alexi’s guitar compositions, as though we should take from death metal the need to love every second of life by breaking all convention given the short time we are here, a true insight to be taken from death metal. The album’s title track of Hexed is a song of wonder about bad circumstances. Alexi tells us, “If spirits could be visible, not just a fallacy, your hex would be tangible, but in reality, they haunt me, taunt me.” It shows someone looking for a glimpse beyond the veil of bad fortune in search for explanation. What we can’t explain though is certainly filled in beautifully by Alexi’s guitar.
Occultism is a clear touching point for the band as songs like Hecate’s Nightmare also demonstrate, but it mostly stays at the level of music being a medium to break normal perception. Sound does have its own energy and spirit, and this becomes a mechanism for occult interests in a lot of musical works. With Children of Bodom, the power of using this as a reference comes from being able to successfully create bizarre chaotic sounds that break normal experience while at the same time showing beauty to what the music offers as an alternative to normality. By focusing on internal awareness also, the question of who we are and what we live for, the band is able to show different inner dimensions of ourselves than most people are aware of, and that is one of the better and more legitimate occult ideas, odd perceptions making sense when given the right context. What Children of Bodom seem to like about those themes is the rupture from normality, darkness, and sense of mystery. They favor eerie sounds, and haunted things capture that well as an image. It’s worth noting here that horror movies figure prominently as influences for a number of dark bands, but while there are great films among those works from the likes of George Romero, John Carpenter, and Dario Argento, most horror movies are typically not great works of art. Children of Bodom though manage to capture the best parts of that spirit, the sense of the forbidden, the disturbing, and the weird that a genius like Franz Kafka would enjoy in horror. So we are fortunate to get only the best of those ideas throughout their albums, but even more so on their best albums, and Hexed is definitely one of them.
This band is about dark creation and overcoming barriers through music and art. Their work is meant to challenge our awareness and use chaos to break free of standard things we take for granted, holding some similarity to the great industrial band Psyclon Nine with that. When Alexi’s guitar grinds out one of those strange soaring melodies, it’s an assault on the listener’s normal way of thinking. It’s meant to get inside and make us someone else, to capture the fire that comes with creative inspiration. They were named after the lake they live by, which was the site of infamous murders. Before people take that the wrong way though, the band is not advocating violence at all. The lake figures into their music more as a place that is haunted by its past. That could mean occult haunting in a literal sense, or it could mean a past that is broken and needs some recognition and adjustments like so much of what we continually live around. The songs often show complaints about life being broken, and Lake Bodom is a fitting image for the tragic frustration of that. In any case, the band is chaotic but is searching for love and connection as the beautiful melodies show. Lake Bodom with its tragic past is basically a weird place that challenges a person to make sense of it, and that is in tune with Alexi’s vision of all of us dancing over hell but looking for something much better.
