��Chicago psych metallers The Atlas Moth are back at last after a nearly three year wait, and album number three The Old Believer sees 'em focusing their sound into something even more powerful and emotional, while continuing to build upon the spacey, textured heaviness that made their 2011 album An Ache For The Distance so impressive. To flesh out the more ambitious sound of their latest, the band brought in a number of guest musicians ranging from Gojira frontman Joe Duplantier and saxophonist Bruce Lamont of Yakuza, to violinists Kim Pack and Sarah Pendleton (Subrosa) and even former Stabbing Westward guitarist Marcus Eliopulos.

��Opening with the bellowing weather-beaten majesty of "Jet Black Passenger", The Old Believer slowly weaves it's weary magic, blending huge doom-laden riffage and elephantine tempos with layered, complex melodies, a multi-pronged vocal attack that mixes together a killer emotive croon and hair-raising feral screams to excellent effect. The Moth's melodic sludginess has often gotten them compared to bands like Jesu and Nadja, but there's really something different going on here, their sound drawing more from certain gloomy strains of post-hardcore, filtered through a searing psychedelic haze that the band forms from striking guitar work, majestic leads, and some fantastic use of effects. There are moments on this album that oddly remind me more of old favorites like Jawbox and Engine Kid than anything that folks might describe as "metalgaze", though fans of the current wave of doom-laden melodic heaviness are certainly going to find a lot to like about Atlas Moth's latest. And the singer's dramatic croon gives this a really distinctive touch as well, his dour singing bringing an almost gothic feel to the band's monstrous crush. Things take a proggier turn on the lush vibraphone-laced "Halcyon Blvd", one of the album's more subdued tracks, while tracks like "Sacred Vine" slip into a bluesy sort of goth-metal that feels like Fields Of The Nephilim getting shot up with some serious stoner-metal riffage. There's some really cool, understated use of electronics throughout the album, looping synth-like arpeggios and washes of gleaming cosmic drift that appear briefly. This stuff soars.

�� And the packaging for the CD edition of Old Believer is stunning all on its own. Using a unique printing process, the removable cover for the album is designed so that the artwork (created by Ryan Clark of Invisible Creature) changes when you run water across the material, the image of a regal snow queen on her throne morphing into something much more sinister - it's one of the coolest things I've seen using this kind of thermal printing for an album package, and you can check out a short video of this neat effect here .