The Blue Season represents most everything that's wrong with the many European bands splicing heavy metal and goth rock in the early 2000s -- too many cooks for one kitchen and certainly way too many ingredients for a single recipe. The resulting dish is understandably overdone, perilously complicated, and too utterly confusing to wholly satisfy the palate. Understand now, virtually every song on the group's second album, 2003's
Cold, boasts some above-average combination of guitar riffs, keyboard effects, verses, and choruses, as well as the sweet final garnish provided by Natalie Pereira dos Santos' siren-like vocals, but when all of it comes together, there's little here that compares to the focused punch of
Lacuna Coil or the exotic experiments of Madder Morten, never mind the downright stellar songwriting of
the Gathering. Isolated album tracks such as "Release," "Hours and Hours," and the title track usually get the job done with no small amount of confidence and more than adequate technical execution, but ultimately, the complete package that is
Cold leaves something to be desired. Still, the band has come a long way from its modest debut, so there's a good chance for a true winner come album number three.