***AELTER is one of several side-projects to emerge from the WOLVSERPENT camp, and uniquely known for a cinematically dreary dreamscape of doom-inspired darkness. Over the course of three albums, Aelter has steadily evolved from the minimal, wide-open expanses of sound—found on 2009's debut Dusk Dawn and 2010's Aelter II: Follow You Beloved (collected together by Crucial Blast in 2011)—to the strange ambient-influenced slowcore first suggested by 2011's critically acclaimed Aelter III and now reaching its fullest fruition on Aelter IV. With bewitching ease, Aelter IV has fully embraced a shadow-cast landscape of gothic Western folk music and hypnotic darkwave pop—but "gothic" in the literary sense, and "pop" stripped of any chart aspirations. It's a sublime and slowly unfolding experience, moving further away from fuzzed-out guitars and into the melancholic melodies of songwriter noir. References to be made number later Swans, Red House Painters, Lycia, Crime and the City Solution, and Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds' more reined-in work, but Aelter's acute attention to texture and tension place this current incarnation into a league of its own. By the album's cathartic end, Aelter IV: Love Eternal emerges as a hauntingly atmospheric and crushing piece of dark romantic Americana.