I like to think of myself as reasonably open-minded when it comes to music, but there have been times when my resistance to new trends has made me feel like something of a luddite. Is it just me, or did other people use those lengthy anonymous techno records on the John Peel show as an excuse to go off and do something else? I also found only minimal appeal in trip-hop, and drum and bass and jungle just seemed plain irritating. True, they provided a necessary alternative to Britpop, but for me it was so-called ‘post rock’ that really hit the mark. Thankfully Peel also played this, and so I was introduced to the wonderful lo-fi world of Flying Saucer Attack. Main man Dave Pearce was seemingly too interested in paying tribute to Popol Vuh to have much time for more modern sounds, leaving occasional collaborator Matt Elliott (aka The Third Eye Foundation) free to take aspects of the FSA sound and mix it with the latest beats. And the results, I had to admit, were often truly extraordinary. With debut album ‘Semtex’ he hit the ground running, and showed the likes of me that maybe there was something in this drum and bass thing after all.

Skittering, nervous rhythms and guitar feedback introduce the inappropriately titled 'Sleep', as thrilling an opening track as you’re ever likely to find. Within seconds a blurred, thickly distorted melodic loop is introduced and a fidgety drum-and-bass beat comes crashing in. The beats have a randomness that do away with any sense of a time signature, but it is oddly catchy all the same. Every so often the sound is intensified by the addition of heavier bass frequencies and new layers of noise and feedback which up the levels of excitement. After 4 minutes the beats drop out entirely and the second half consists entirely of glorious waves of distortion. To fans of Les Rallizes Dénudés it may sound like the hit single that never was. ‘Still-Life’ fades in on what sounds like a field recording of an open-air war dance surrounded by chirruping crickets, before rudimentary Velvet Underground guitars and tom toms chime in with a plaintive looped riff. The drum and bass beats return but in a slower and more regular fashion than on the opening track. Melancholy female vocals add a wordless refrain that only adds to the ecstatically heartbroken MBV vibe. It appears to come to an end at 5 minutes, but Matt Elliott obviously feels that he hasn’t yet got the point across and an extended reprise stretches the song past the 11 minute mark. This is a good thing, as it is a gorgeous noise. ‘Dreams On His Fingers’ is slower and sadder still, with the beats so over-recorded that they are the most distorted thing on it. The female vocals are now singing actual words, but the meaning is impossible to make out. It is closer to the reverbed lullabies of Michigan’s Windy & Carl than the wintry distorted folk music of FSA but the skittering rhythms that occasionally make themselves heard through the washes of sound maintain the distinctive Third Eye Foundation sound. They come to the fore again with the start of the record’s second half, but really ‘Next Of Kin’ is just a more uptempo continuation of the sound established by the previous song. The unintelligible female vocals follow the guitar chords through an endlessly repeated descending cycle. Here more than anywhere it is clear that without the drum and bass beats this could sound like just another shoe-gazing album, albeit a very good one. But by incorporating a more contemporary genre into the mix something newer and altogether more exciting is achieved. After these two ‘songs’ the final third of the album is more minimalist in nature. ‘Once When I Was An Indian’ is a ghostly twelve minute one-chord ritual, with tribal rhythms, hypnotic vocals and distorted, reverbed piano notes which sound like water dripping in a cave. At the half way mark it dies away to nothing but tape hiss, but is brought back to life with pounding reverberating drum beats straight out of Neu! 2. This may be where some listeners drawn in by the promise of the opening track may start to lose interest, but as a continuation of the album’s trajectory of musical disintegration it works a treat. Its mood bleeds into closing track ‘Rain’, a title which couldn’t be more self-explanatory. Just as Kraftwerk’s ‘Autobahn’ LP finished with electronic birdsong, ‘Semtex’ concludes with electronic rainfall. But whereas the former topped off its bucolic mood with a pretty little flute melody, this track does little more than add increasing quantities of harsh, abstract noise. But then again an LP with a photo of a dead fox on the cover is never going to have a happy ending.

Note: Having written this review and searched the net for an illustration I've discovered that this album isn't as easily available as the releases that followed Matt Elliott's signing to Domino Records. These are all good in their own way, but it's worth making the extra effort to seek out this fine debut.

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