4 out of 5

Produced by: Gernot Bronsert, Sascha Ring, Sebastian Szary

Label: Monkeytown Records

This is some slinky stuff, baby, but it slinks on over to the dark side, resulting in a pretty devastatingly affecting listen: gorgeous, danceable, mysterious, and compelling.  Moderat remains, as always, aggressive BPpitchers Modeselektor and swoony IDM guy Sascha Ring, a.k.a. Apparat, middlegrounding and morphing into something much smoother than the sum of its parts, and entrancing in ways that their individually awesome compositions aren’t; that is: Go listen to Modselektor and Apparat, absolutely, but also listen to Moderat, because they’re all different experiences.

III shares the woozy dance floor vibe of its predecessors, with Ring maybe adding that gloss to Modeselektor’s glitch beats, resulting in head bobbing singles from the outset.  This means the same criticism can be made, though, of the album’s tracks maybe lacking enough identity, nailing a similar sensation from track to track.  But: challenge accepted, as the beats slowly become more dangerous sounding as the runtime ticks on: there’s a bit more clatter, a bit more aggression in the vocals.  It’s an amazing, if subtle, shift, and it grabs your earholes’ attention for the disc’s remainder.  Things of course swing back through groovy, swirly glitz, but never quite leave that darkness behind once its dipped its toes in, making the album, taken as a whole, quite an affecting journey.