Track Listing
1. I've Lost That Loving Feline
2. What Is It With You
3. Stone Cold Said So
4. Half A Tiger
5. Lost
6. Are You Still A Cliche
7. Goddamit You've Got To Be Kind
| Details | | Number of CDs: | 1 | | Producer: | Matt Elliott | | Recording Type: | Studio | | Distributor: | PIAS UK/Sony DADC | | Recording Mode: | Stereo |
Album Notes
Solo performer: Matt Elliot.Recorded in 1999.Treading far less aggressive and dark ground than YOU GUYS KILL ME, this album is still cut from similarly lo-fi gothic cloth. "What Is It With You" overlays several vocal lines building upon one another until a burst of drum 'n' bass trills brings it to a grinding halt. "Lost" has a lovely repeated guitar passage that's punctuated by soft piano chords and a beautiful female vocal. The largely acoustic arrangement evolves over 11 minutes attaining a wonderful psychedelic haze. The album closes with "Goddamit You've Got To Be Kind," a quiet haunting trip-hop number with an overlying string motif that simply falls into diminuendo as the breath leaves the pipes.It would seem a paradoxical combination, the harshest of rhythmic styles and the most beautiful of melodies, but in its own way, it's very primal. Matt Elliott's collage technique is quite organic, unlike Hal Willner or Moby, whose albums are more episodic. Elliott uses a selective palette of themes and creates the songs seemingly as artists put paint on canvas. The choral samples echo previous work, but here the mood is more soulful, accessible and hypnotic, though not without drama. "I wanted to make a beautiful record," says Elliott, "something to melt hearts."
Editorial Reviews
8 out of 10 - ...A willfully warped gothic imagination...[turning] dreams into flesh....It's an unexpected assertion of sassiness in a macabre context, yet it never quite breaks the mood...Q (4/00, p.100) - 3 stars out of 5 - ...his most accessible album yet....it trips serenely through ambient, dub and drum'n'bass....Elliot's approach is deliberately ramshackle....it clearly works.Alternative Press (4/00, pp.103-4) - 4 out of 5 - ...[Matt] Elliot remains one of the UK's most intriguing musicians and Third Eye Foundation still sound 'awesome'...The Wire (2/00, pp.54-5) - The ponderous autism of slowed down voices and melodies haunts the skittering grooves and loops....inflecting a painful condition of loss and separation...CMJ (2/14/00, p.20) - ...takes Matt Elliot's psychedlic drum'n'bass even closer to the light....turns a genre usually utilized for dancefloor hedonism into a space-age 'memento mori'.NME (2/26/00, p.35) - 7 out of 10 - ...a record almost entirely constructed from Matt Elliott's sampled collection of things that go bump in the night...creating maximum unease, giving rise to a delicious rumour that this is an album written in order to scare children.... a post D&B seance...Melody Maker (3/28/00, p.49) - 4.5 stars out of 5 - ...A sepia amalgam of splurging beats, muted brass and baldy-pranged sonic mulch....7 truly haunting songs which sound like nothing else on Earth...
Spin (06/01/2000)
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