For a long time, Chelsea Wolfe has been one of those musicians I felt I should, in theory, love but never quite managed to click with, despite the fact that I couldn't find anything to particularly dislike about her either. In cases like these, it's usually a new album coming around at the perfect moment and making everything else fall into place that finally changes my mind. This is exactly what happened with Abyss. While it doesn't tread much new ground, instead continuing down the same darkly menacing path as Wolfe's last several releases, it does find her perfecting her gothic blend of folk, industrial, metal, and grunge, resulting in a consistently strong end product. Though not exactly easy listening, Abyss also never grows tedious or grating, even at nearly an hour long.

I think one of the main problems I've had with getting into Wolfe is that her powerful vocals and beautiful melodies have in the past been a little too obscured by layers of noise and distortion. As a result, they often took patience to dig out, a daunting proposition if you're not already a fan. Abyss is probably Wolfe's cleanest-sounding album yet, which makes it more accessible and immediate. But it also achieves this without sacrificing an ounce of her music's ominous mystique. Songs like "Carrion Flowers," "Dragged Out," and "Color of Blood" go all out in this regard, rich with overblown synths, groaning strings, eerily manipulated samples, and heart-pounding climaxes that arrive in a cinematic swoop. At the center of these intense vortexes of sound, Wolfe's palpably pained vocals, swimming in reverb, maintain a commanding presence.

However, the album's greatest power lies in its more nakedly vulnerable moments. One of these is "Iron Moon," which alternates its muted verses, Wolfe murmuring poetically over sparse accompaniment, with grungy walls of guitar anchored to her distorted wail, "My heart is a tomb/My heart is an empty room." Other tracks like "Maw" and "Crazy Love" are less dramatic in their rendering of emotion, but no less compelling. The former leans in a more shoegaze-inspired direction, with gauzy instrumentation and vocals and a subtle build-up that emphasizes beauty over terror and culminates in a surprisingly soaring chorus. The latter takes a turn toward the acoustic and is almost sweetly romantic as Wolfe proclaims ethereally over an orchestral crescendo, "I don't want to live without you."

This is a style of music that could easily become dreary or overbearing or, worst of all, comically melodramatic, but Wolfe is a master of balance, tempering the most oppressively dark moments with songs that reach, even briefly, toward the light. While not an album to be played casually, Abyss is still more versatile than one might expect. It may appear on the surface that Chelsea Wolfe is painting with a very limited palette of shades, but the tonal and emotional variety she manages to coax from them proves that she's no one-trick pony.