The third album to come from Wolvserpent-offshoot Aelter, III moves beyond the fantastic ethereal heaviness and synth-drenched darkwave of main member Blake Green's previous albums into mucho heavier realms of blackened gloom. There's a lot of the same mysterious, midnight ambience that you hear in Wolvserpent. But where that band delivers slo-mo crushing riffage and mesmerizing nocturnal vibes, this stuff travels further into the ether, emerging out of gorgeous murky synthesizers and harmonized choral voices into a haunting doomgaze finale.

The first half of "Clarity" drifts in slowly on a wave of warm, glimmering synthesizers, the shimmery glacial drones spreading out into infinity, a kind of blissed-out kosmische crawl that feels like something from Tangerine Dream or Steve Roach softly billowing out of your speakers. This heavenly twilight synth-glow spreads across almost the entire side, sheets of wavering chordal shift and muted cosmic drone overlapping one another, the sound of pure electronic dreamblur. Asit progresses though, the sound slowly darkens, grows more ominous as it transforms into towering spires of gothic drone that rise over the last several minutes of the side, suddenly shifting into a looping mass of guttural, murky synth-groan at the very end that resembles the pitch-shifted moaning of sightless monks woven into an unsettling death-chant.

But when the second side starts back up, the music suddenly changes into slow, droning blackened metal, eerie minor key guitars creeping across howling distant choral voices and washed-out droning synths and the pulsating throb of the drums and bass, the sound tense and ominous, almost like something from Year Of No Light slowed to a funereal pace and draped in nightmarish choirs. When the lead vocals come in, they're a deep, ethereal croon drenched in reverb, hinting at that blackened darkwave sound of Aelter albums past, but here pushed deeper into the swirling twilight fog. When the last half of the song comes in, it transforms yet again into a final long stretch of ghostly, jangly gloom with high, keening tremolo riffs rising over catchy minor key strum and a crushing distorted bass-riff, the melodies almost like something out of a Badalamenti score, woven with the gorgeous doom-laden gloompop and gothic synthdrift that finally consumes the song. Pretty amazing, and quite different from anything that I've heard from Aelter.

We have some of the last copies available of the vinyl edition of Aelter's III that came out on Handmade Birds, as its now sold out from the label; for those cassette-junkies out there, we also have the new limited-edition tape of III that the band just released on their own Wolvserpent label, limited to one hundred copies and presented in a gorgeous silk-screened black cardstock cover.