Sear hails from the darker corners of the Finnish metal scene with a quite blistering melting pot of molten explosions that mixes up things from nearly every corner of the more extreme flavours of metal. Death and Black are the main courses, but one can hear pinches of doom in the epicness of some of the arrangements.

Vocalist Hyytiäinen is a very capable throat abuser, who has several powerful modes in command of his voice. The growling is guttural, the higher-pitched snarling right along the legendary lines of the likes of master Abbath and the very occasional hoarse-yet-cleaner shouts are commendable as well. The players are all definite beasts of their craft and especially drummer Laaksonen is motherloving ruthless with the blastbeats. The production is solid as steel as the soundscape dominates and crushes.

The only thing keeping their second record from totally destroying is the song material. Heaven Ablaze churns ahead with a powerful mid-tempo beatdown that is nothing short of unrelenting. Violation Of The Soul takes a thrashy mosh-tempo, throws in some atmospheric interludes and ends it with a brutal blastfest with harmonized growls and snarls. Weeping Flesh goes a bit more technical with deathy riffs and melodic leads to create a very epic madness, with some much appreciated groove in the bridges. But aside from a few prime cuts, many of the songs just don’t grab my nuts and tear them out with vicious intent. The hooks are missing. Fast and überheavy parts swish through without leaving much to memory and I am a bit confused, that how did the inspiration seemingly run dry so often. Nothing is bad, but more so unspectacular, evenly mediocre technical prowess.

Sear is a band that definitely has the tools to make something phenomenal in the extreme metal scene, just as long as they get their pencils sharpened into a state where the majority of the tracks on an album kill as well as the best ones on Lamentations Of Destruction.