Review Summary: The Last Season is not here to redefine, it's here to simply represent the definition well.
Consciousness Removal Project’s
The Last Season is a nice, tasty slab of post-metal, nicely layered with lots of diverse instrumentation. For the most part, the album seems to know the right time to be grimy, heavy, and crushing, and when to slide back down to ambient, calm, and refreshing. When the album does occasionally forget, it’s only due to natural instrumental meandering, simply wandering through a certain passage for too long, with ideas losing strength along the way. But besides its lengthier, more dragging passages,
The Last Season rarely stops being a well-written, enjoyable ride.
Heavy, infectious riffs parade through the album, all but the rather eerie ambient interlude, “Negative Photosynthesis.” And when these riffs are combined with the album’s raspy, harsh vocals, it makes for a concoction of pure, sludgy goodness. But the album isn’t all heavy riffs, it has a number of other diverse instrumental flourishes, like the violin in “Soil Sacrifice,” the synth lines in “Moraine,” and the piano passage in “Kyoto.” Some of the album’s flourishes are a bit uncalled for, or seem like they come out of nowhere, like the clean vocals in the title track. But most of the time, they keep things interesting and create a very layered, inviting atmosphere.
The Last Season, during a lot of its length, seems to simply be a display of cool sounds; it doesn’t seem to have any higher goals it wants to achieve or messages it wants to express, and there’s no extremely visible connection between all the songs. But that’s not necessarily a bad thing, because the album is
fun. It’s a fairly lengthy, well-written post-metal album that’s very easy to get lost in. It goes back and forth from dense, heavy, and sinister to atmospheric and soothing. And even though they are at times a bit disconnected and a bit underdeveloped, it still has many other different instrumental quirks to keep you entertained.
The Last Season may not be a revolution, but it’s a more than worthy ambassador of the kind of music it contains.
