Rather forgettable, to be honest.
Another week, another generic death/thrash metal album. 'Chaos Reign Supreme' is the third album from Swedish group Serpent Obscene, a band who refer to their songs as "metal commandments" and manage to write ten tracks without a single standout, attention grabbing moment. 'Chaos Reign Supreme' washes over you like a light drizzle of gutteral vocals, fast paced drumming and chunky riffing, leaving you with little lasting memory of it's contents.
This album certainly isn't bad, it's more a case of being bland and inoffensive to the point that, paradoxically, it does actually offend. It's just so soul crushingly underwhelming, that I felt vaguely hostile and agitated. Perhaps that's the effect that the band were aiming for, although it's definetly more of a niggling feeling of vague discontent, rather than a rage filled hatred of everyone and everything brought on by anger-fuelled heavy metal. Despite amusing song titles like 'Necro Angel' and 'Carnal Contortion', most of that which is on offer here is, to sum it up concisely, dull.
But 'Chaos Reign Supreme' isn't, as the score I gave it shows, a total train wreck of an album. It's boring to the point of being soporific, but it also displays that the band possess a degree of technical skill. Everything has a pleasingly speedy pace to it, and the dual guitar assault from Johan Thorngren and Nicklas Eriksson provides some of the few catchy moments on the album. Vocalist Erik Tormentor (oh god how I wish that was his real name...) has a more interesting style than the typical low pitched death metal growl, closer in sound to the shrill shrieks of black metal, mixed with a thrashier influence. I guess the group just lack the song writing skills to go with their admittedly above average technical proficiency (although the drummer occasionally sounds out of time to my ears).
I'm sure there's someone out there who'll enjoy this album, probably who already owns a number of identical sounding death metal albums somewhere into the three figure mark. But for the rest of us, this is probably something to be avoided. It's not going to send you spiralling into depression and suicide, but it isn't going to hold your interest or make you happy either, so really unless you desperately need to get rid of ten quid, it's best avoided.