The latest release from Matt Elliott, the protagonist behind the Third Eye Foundation, is a resolutely dour one under his own name, the final part in a trilogy of “songs” albums following Drinking Songs and Failing Songs. Tellingly, Elliott opens the album with a song named after the five stages of grief proposed in Elisabeth Kubler-Ross’ On Death and Dying and experienced, in particular, by those diagnosed with a terminal illness. The downbeat mood barely lifts from there on in. Seemingly owing as much to mournful Portuguese fado and Eastern European folk musics as the drum & bass and music concrete that fuelled TEF, Howling Songs is spectacularly glum and very, very special.