Album of the day: Aelter II – Follow You Beloved (LP)

Lovingly pinched from The Inarguable: The Wolvserpent crew has always been a source of intrigue. As you all know by now, I’m a big fan of the duo of Blake Green and Brittany McConnell’s dark, “backwoods”-like doom, with their latest offering Blood Seed working its way onto my Top 10 of 2010. Yet, with my fandom set in stone, I had unknowingly gone almost two years without knowing of guitarist and vocalist Green’s side project, the oddly spelled Aelter.

Whereas Wolvserpent receives the attention of media outlet Roadburn and labels like 20 Buck Spin or Crucial Blast, who recently re-released Blood Seed as a double album with the previously sold-out Gathering Strengths, Aelter lives in the shadows, relying on limited, gorgeously packaged releases for means of its meager survival. On his own, Green sheds his normally devastatingly heavy style for something more quiet and perplexing; as unique and obscure as it intends to be.

With a subtitle like Follow You Beloved, one would expect something a bit more…“romantic,” and, in a way, you’d be completely right. Both Beloved and Follow You carry a distinct, almost loving characteristic that might not come across as clearly in either Wolvserpent or Mezektet (Wolvserpent’s collaboration with (a) Story of Rats), while still retaining Green’s unique sense of harmony. Immediate comparisons can be drawn to Green’s layers of guitar on Blood Seed‘s opening track ‘Wolv‘, though, rather than unsettling and dark, these two track feature something a bit more harmonious and grandiose in comparison.

Looking down, one will notice the “doom metal” tag and, while that is true, what Aelter does doesn’t necessarily fly beneath the doom metal banner. With the help of our friends in the ambient and drone genres, and maybe even a little post-rock here and there,

Continue reading: The Inarguable: Aelter – “Aelter II: Follow You Beloved” (2011) [Wolvserpent Records].

Tags: Aelter, Aelter II: Follow You Beloved, Album of the day, ambient, Blake Green, Brittany McConnell, doom metal, drones, The Inarguable, Wolvserpent, Wolvserpent Records

This entry was posted on Thursday, July 28th, 2011 at 1:30 pm and is filed under 2011, Album of the Day, Roadburn Recommended . You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.