Label: Domino Format: CD,LP
There’s been a slow evolution of the Third Eye Foundation sound going on for quite a while, as the feedback sculptures and harsh breakbeats of previous releases give way to a more accomplished digital sound. No less committed to the darker, eerie drones and clattery loops than before, You Guys Kill Me retains the edgy feel of releases like the unsettling Ghost album, but with added depth and a refined feel for the possibilities of mixer and sampler. The backwards breaks and intensely unnerving cries of “For All the Brothers And Sisters” are a case in point, scattering hyperspeed snare rolls around a cluster of feral yawls, it’s like a batch of very combative cats have gathered to scratch some serious ass, and there are further (though note quite as disturbing) examples spread throughout the album.
Where the darker Drum & Bass artists work exceedingly well in their high-energy, dancefloor-oriented way, Matt Elliott combines the thunderous bass and ominous timestretched abstractions with a spooky ambience which militates against motion, more often oppressing than enervating. Even the tinny shuffle of Funkier numbers such as “An Even Harder Shade Of Dark” is gradually cut to ribbons by swooping beats and smeared production, twitching in response to some kind of possession as minor key strings add a suitably funereal edge. This is digital voodoo stripped of its sexual charge, found in the mechanistic death rattle of “No Dove No Covenant,” fractured into an icy, attenuated parade of spectral disturbance, a poltergeist in the machine.
Despite the downbeat mood, grimly ironic titles such as “There’s A Fight At the End Of The Tunnel” or “That Would Be Exhibiting The Same Weak Traits” hint at a perfectionist’s cynicism at the futility of existence in the same way that Godflesh or Scorn have done. The healthy mocking of religiosity they’re fond of is implicit in You Guys too, taking both the soaring and melancholic aspects of the best church music and twisting it to more existential ends. Cold as the grave and as dire as the dread imprecations of a blind idiot god, this album chills in the non-Ambient sense, the percussive maelstrom more often a reflection of psychological turmoil than any hyperkinetic rush of ecstasy. But after the hallucinatory jumble, the album closes with an almost jaunty “In Bristol With A Pistol,” ending on a chord of rising ire which cuts out to a discordant drone, a startling jerk back from the reflective mood to an almost abusive closure.
-Freq1C –
