Review by Rexorcist for Sear Bliss - The Arcane Odyssey (2007)

God was finding a melo-black release with some real creativity an annoying three days.  Everything I tried on my own from Windir re-evaluations to key players of the development to modern giants were basically writing the same song over and over again.  I had to rely on two different Reddit metal communities and Metal Academy to pass around recs.  After starting many and deciding they weren't the creative geniuses I was looking for, I finally checked out Ben's recommendation, The Arcade Odyssey by Sear Bliss.  This was the one.

Now the album started out with a clever rewriting of the standard tropes you often find in the atmospheric brand, but it wasn't long before these impressive melodies found their way into other territories.  The first two songs were good, but I was worried that the rest of the album would follow too closely to the examples of the first too songs.  This worry was largely counteracted by a moody and somewhat slow venture into blackened doom with Lost and Not Found, and almost completely eradicated when they decided to go hard, heavy, fast and furious immediately afterward with Thorns of Deception, the shortest song at exactly four minutes.  There were psychedelic moments, symphonic moments, the experimental package I was looking for, but never once did the band steer so fast as the destroy their sound or endanger the flow or the consistency.  I can't see myself picking favorites out of this bunch, even.  But the best thing about the album is this: when the second to last track, Somewhere, fades out 7 minutes in and stays silent for two minutes, we get this surprisingly folksy black metal song which basically screams at you: we're not done yet!  We're giving you the ending twist you didn't see coming!

This is my current new standard for melodic black metal albums to beat.  This is my first Sear Bliss album, and I'm perfectly satisfied.  They restrained themselves while allowing other influences the have a strong enough say to differentiate everything, even if they never fully broke away from the melo-black that they have been working on since their debut in the 90's.  But who knows?  Maybe I'll like one of their other albums even more.  And if not, I still found what I was looking for.