Matt Elliott
The Mess We Made
Merge (US) / Domino (UK)

People often talk about albums in the context of how many "listens" it takes to "get" them. It's the general consensus, for example, that Kid A and Hail to the Thief took Radiohead fans much longer to get into than the comparatively straightforward The Bends and OK Computer. Something like Fountains of Wayne's Welcome Interstate Managers clicks right from the start.

Matt Elliott, who already has released several albums of twisted, fucked-up jungle under the name Third Eye Foundation, strikes out in a different direction on The Mess We Made. Elliott's first album under his own name is a nuanced, ever-shifting masterwork that reveals its biggest rewards to the listener who's got 53 minutes to experience the whole thing, start to finish, and who's willing to do this several times.

Not surprisingly, Elliott makes a stylistic break from Third Eye Foundation as well as a taxonomic one. Whereas 3EF was all about sick samples layered over even sicker beats, The Mess We Made takes a more hand-crafted, organic approach. There are still samples all over the place. But many of them, particularly the choral snippets Elliott is so fond of slicing and dicing, seem to owe their inspiration to the gorgeous cathedral in Elliott's native Bristol, England. Despite the choral samples' majesty, live instruments — as well as what are probably extended samples of live instruments — make the bulk of the musical impressions, giving Elliott's work the overall feel of chamber music rather than cut-and-paste collage.

Elliott establishes the mood of his old material early, with "Let Us Break," where he informs the listener that, "Before this shit, there was shit. And before that shit, there was shit." Following that rosy pronouncement, the song drops the vocals altogether. A minimalist, minor-key electronic piano pairs with snippets of choral samples and a mournful, probably synthetic French horn or coronet that'd fit right in at a funeral. They yield to a keyboard that does its best to capture what you might expect a music box on David Lynch's dresser to sound like, before it plods right into the album's creepiest song, "Also Ran."

Elliott's thematic gear shifting and tempo changing make the album's separation into eight tracks largely beside the point. "Also Ran" opens with solitary keyboard and reverbed vocals that play themselves out before slowing and then reversing direction. The creepy keyboard and vocals give way to a jazzy chill-out beat at about the 2:15 mark. In an instant, the song is reborn as a different tune, defying the track indicator on the CD player that still reads "2." The same thing happens again about two minutes later, when it shifts into yet another dirge with the funereal horn from the first track making its return.

Even though Elliott handles all these mood shifts and tempo changes flawlessly, the album's myriad changes do ruin "the single effect." There's no song you can throw on a mix CD, or play quickly in a friend's car stereo on the way to work. With the possible exception of the drunken, old-world sea chantey, "The Sinking Ship Song," The Mess We Made's eight tracks would be irreparably harmed by their removal from their larger context. Anyone haphazardly downloading scattered tracks via Kazaa or Grokster would be more befuddled than bedazzled. (Elliott seems to shoot for confusing illegal downloaders, titling the second-to-last track "End.")

That's not to say there isn't plenty of bedazzling stuff happening on The Mess We Made. The tradeoff for the lack of a quick hit is an album rich in depth and subtlety. Repeat listeners will notice the little things, like how the nine-minute "Cotard's Syndrome" contains, in its third and sixth minutes, a snatch of melody that forms the basis of the next track, "The Sinking Ship Song."

Yet none of this foreshadowing is obvious. Elliott brings together all the disparate elements, hints of what's to come and echoes of what's gone before with the skill of a master composer. And, like the best composers, he's created shifting songs that reveal new meaning with repeat listens. On its face, The Mess We Made is a hell of a downer. Play "Forty Days," which closes the album, for the first time and you'll hear two lovelorn guitars, cello, stand-up bass and sampled choral arrangements in service of a dirge-like waltz. On subsequent listens, though, the way the two guitars play off one another and flit in and out of the mix suggests a pair of intertwined red balloons dancing in front of the song's gray, Eastern European backdrop. The snares you hear as Elliott's masterwork comes to a close aren't marking time for a funeral procession. They're playing a wedding march.

— Eric Wittmershaus (ericw at flakmag dot com)