This is the debut album from US progressive metal band This Is the Last Time.
Acclimation features four songs, with a total duration of 31 minutes. The promo blurb mentions bands such as Cloudkicker, Meshuggah, Isis, Year of No Light, In Flames, Between the Buried and Me, Gorguts, and Pelican, so this should give you some insight into the waters that Acclimation wades in.
This is an instrumental album that takes progressive metal, post-metal, and post-rock influences and forges an album of sweeping colour and texture. With cinematic scope and melodic depth, the music comes to life in broad soundscapes of vivid depth and substance.
The songs each have their own identity, while confidently contributing to the whole. The band offer range of different delivery styles across the songs, yet never lose sight of the overarching edifice that is being built by the different materials. Synths layer the music with rich feeling, while the guitars provide shape to the structure of the songs. The often technical drumming complements the bass presence well, allowing a firm foundation above which the melody and atmosphere soars high.
Acclimation is frequently beautiful and dreamy, with a melancholic atmosphere that sometimes swells into unexpected hope, however delicate and tentative. Within this lie aggressive tendencies that run bright and hot, rather than cold and dark, which could so easily have been the case. The music is easy to become absorbed in, and Acclimation holds the listener’s interest well.
No matter what any individual part of any particular song is doing at any given moment, This Is the Last Time’s worldbuilding is compelling enough to allow it to cloak the listener in warm waves of feeling and emotion. Acclimation provides an immersive journey for the listener to take, one that’s rewarding enough to travel down multiple times.
A highly recommended listen.
Wonderbox Metal 