Last night, I dreamt that my roommate and I bought too much swordfish to cook for dinner. Except it was one of those nights when what we referred to as "swordfish" took the form of a giant slab of ground beef. The bloody hunk of meat covered three square feet of counter space and towered six inches thick, and after preparing a small portion, we were left at a loss as to what to do with the unruly leftovers. Since it's unsanitary to keep so much raw meat in the fridge, we were faced with only two options: we could either cook the rest of it and pack up the tamed result in Tupperware, or better yet, we could look into returning the unused portion to the supermarket.
Naturally, I felt extremely uncomfortable with the idea of returning the meat. We'd already handled it and eaten part of it. It was left at room temperature for 20 minutes! If the Stop & Shop took it back and sold it to another customer, what would that say about where the meat had already been when we purchased it?
I woke up in a cold sweat with clenched teeth and my nails driven into my palms. As a long time vegetarian who recently began experimenting with fish, the excess of bloody carnage I referred to as swordfish seemed somewhat creepy, as it hinted that, in my waking hours, I might naively be consuming a "gateway meat." Yes, I'm concerned that eating swordfish will lead first to "harder meats," and eventually to heroin addiction. Third Eye Foundation's Little Lost Soul is a soundtrack for such nightmares.
Just kidding! Like fellow Bristol natives Portishead, the Third Eye Foundation (otherwise known as TEF, 3EF, or Matt Elliot) is endlessly compared to soundtracks of nightmares, creepy sleepless nights, and haunting films that haven't been made. Entertainment Weekly called Third Eye Foundation's music "like a soundtrack to some great lost surrealist film." Flagpole writes that Elliot, who collaborated with Flying Saucer Attack in their earlier days, comes up with "some most disturbing dream soundtracks." Wasn't this cliché beaten into submission like three years ago?
Third Eye Foundation's third full-length on Merge can be aptly described with the vocabulary of nightmares. That is, the album's mood could be described as "haunted," "lonely," "lingering urban darkness," "chilling ambient constructions of uncertain sonic terrain," "layers of bleak drones that crumble under breakbeats and digital bleeps," "spooky pastiche," "eerie," and "otherworldly." But any respectable nightmare isn't comprised of haunted-house synths and spooky loops of minor-key drones. Truly disturbing dreams are made of uncomfortable pacing, plodding anticipation, and disarming juxtapositions. And that's what's missing from Little Lost Soul.
A lack of reference to relevant cultural narratives is what separates Little Lost Soul's innocuously pleasant spook-out from albums like Endtroducing that manipulate you into sonic spaces in which you might feel hesitant to step forward before finding yourself pushed. DJ Shadow's uncomfortably alluring concoction of cultural references and urban found-sound tag-teamed familiar beats with cinematic pacing. Clearly, it has a far greater chance of approximating the world of dreams than bent drones and choirgirl vocals run through reverb pedals.
When Matt Elliot rid himself of the rougher textures and harder jungle beats of his 1997 LP, Ghost, some of Third Eye Foundation's nervous energy was traded in for a sound palate that shared more than just a few tricks with the more goth end of the new age spectrum. On Little Lost Soul, Elliot has pointlessly sugared the pill with smoother production, and as a result, the album lacks the power of the dreamworlds its eerie textures allude to. Personally, I'd rather swallow the less refined Ghost. If we're going to sugar the pill, it better not be a placebo.
