Reviews list 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.

Following the feature in The North clan that featured their 2004 offering (Glory and Perdition), I picked up on Sear Bliss' follow up release after a track got featured on a clan playlist in the last couple of months.  As with their previous offering, The Arcane Odyssey immediately sang to me as a furthering of the refreshing take on melodic black metal that Sear Bliss have.  This release makes solid and consistent use of horns again - in fact I suspect there is more of them this time around - again never allowing them to dominate proceedings, still letting them swell in the space behind the rest of the instrumentation and never once leaving any hint of a doubt that you are listening to a black metal record in the first instance.

I do not often find myself enjoying back to back releases from artists and so Sear Bliss already find themselves in an elite club in my standings after just two albums.  The balance they achieve in their songs is astonishing, retaining an aggressive edge but the main takeaway are the rich and illustrious melodies that fill every track with a subtle grandiosity that shows a band in control of their own destiny, set on a path of their own choosing and revelling in the glory that they create as a tight and cohesive unit.  Tracks do not always follow a conventional format and even when you think they have ended they can continue down a different and unexpected path.

The same vibes jump out at me on this record as I got with their previous release.  The borderline cosmic elements of Darkspace, the whooshing melodicism of Drudkh and the atmospheric elements of latter day Negura Bunget.  There is also a retention of that brooding Mayhem mood sitting here as well.  It is as if Sear Bliss possess a lot more threat than you may take in upon first listen and they are happy to leave that teaser in the background to keep the listener on their toes.  Second track A Deathly Illusion deploys this near black 'n roll rhythm alongside those ever familiar horns to the point where the riffs began to hint at being just a bit seedy and dirty, giving a sense that the sleeves can get rolled up when needed in Sear Bliss.

This time around there are no interludes (an aspect that I had no issue with - for once - on Glory and Perdition) and this is a definite positive for the album.  This record flows really well, taking little risks along the way and simply working with their established sound.  It is not a safe record by any means though and still is unrepentant in its use of brass instrumentation and cleaner musical passages to cast ethereal atmospheres.  The lead work here would not be out of place on a traditional doom metal record and there are times when the record takes on such a pace to match as well.  Overall though, The Arcane Odyssey is a triumph of consistent song writing and textured layering of the elements contained therein.  This band are one of my favourite Metal Academy discoveries of 2022.