Children of Bodom

Blooddrunk is Children Of Bodom's sixth album, but make no mistake. Guitarist/vocalist Alexi Laiho still shreds like a virile young Spartan, who lives to riff and riffs to live. Hopefully, with the release of the shred-a-licious Blooddrunk, Laiho will finally be recognized as a guitarist in the same league as Trivium's Matt Heafy or Dragonforce's Herman Li! Blooddrunk is a successful exercise in Finnish-Euro metal: keyboards, melodic guitars, crafty axe-work, screamed vocals and plenty of well-worn groove. Almost every song, especially the chant-happy title track, "Banned From Heaven," the cleverly titled "Lobodomy" and "Done With Everything, Die For Nothing," will have headbangers flailing about and thrashing their noggins until they burst blood vessels in their poor, unsuspecting necks. While fellow Scandinavian bands are consciously drifting away from super-aggressive, metallic tones, Children Of Bodom grow more and more ferocious. Blooddrunk is certainly intoxicated on its own riffs. Viva la hangover! –— Amy Sciarretto
03.25.08

Boy, whoever thought that technical metal was dead as a doornail during the mid- to late '90s has been proven dead wrong. Just a few years after this aforementioned era of "metal no man's land," technical metal has spread like a virus, via bands that share both an appreciation of the extreme aggression of Slayer and the technical proficiency of Iron Maiden. A fitting example of both of these metallic styles colliding as one is Finland's Children of Bodom, and especially their 2008 offering, Blooddrunk. All the ingredients from past Bodom releases are present once more -- Goth keyboards, guitar acrobatics, and vocals that sound straight out of the torture chamber. These lads sure can play their instruments, as evidenced by such intense metal blasts as the title track, "Smile Pretty for the Devil," and "Tie My Rope." But one thing that differentiates Children of Bodom from the host of other similarly styled bands is that they know the importance of succinct songwriting -- only one track here stretches past the five-minute mark. As a result, Blooddrunk showcases one of the few modern-day metal bands that manage to balance straight-to-the-point songwriting with their collective instrumental prowess. ~ Greg Prato, All Music Guide