A typical hazy, wobbly, subtly “motorik” cut by Peaking Lights already throbs with enough echo chamber exploration to last an average band a lifetime, making a dub album seem like a slightly baffling move: after all, how do you do a dub of a track that’s already thoroughly dubbed-up?

Such reservations are proven pretty much accurate. Whereas the finest recent “reimagining” projects – Jamie xx’s atmospheric Gil Scott-Heron remix album We’re New Here and Duppy Writer, Wrongtom’s Jamaican music-influenced stroll through the Roots Manuva back catalogue – twisted their source materials into unexpected and as such exhilarating shapes, much of Lucifer in Dub – featuring dub versions of six tracks from this year’s third LP Lucifer – doesn’t sound far-off enough from the original.

At its least compelling, Lucifer in Dub is almost indistinguishable from its parent album, only with Indra Dunis’ vocal melodies cut up, tweaked and sent sailing on a creaky raft on a turbulent sea of purposefully misshapen, hiss-infested emissions from what sounds like homespun noise-making machinery on the brink of a total blackout. This can verge on an act of self-sabotage. By retracting the spotlight from the singsong melodies, and the human warmth they bring to proceedings, Peaking Lights risk submerging into other, less interesting blenders of esoteric, achingly hip influences that the West Coast duo’s pop nous normally separate them from. Vintage dub reggae – obviously a huge inspiration to Dunis and Aaron Coyes – thrives on the throbbing interplay of bass and drums; on their own, Peaking Lights’ charmingly creaky analogue synth constructs can’t hope to compete with such organic dynamics, no matter how thorough their familiarity with dub reggae’s erratic logic of addition and subtraction.

Lucifer in Dub is by no means pointless. A dreamy take on album highlight ‘Lo Hi’ – named, as dub traditions dictate, ‘Lo Dub Hi Dub’ – cooks up a charmingly unhurried, hypnotic drift. At the opposite end of the spectrum, ‘Live Dub’ (‘Live Long’) and ‘My Heart Dubs 4 U’ (‘Dream Beat’) emphasise the percussive clatter that was previously hidden somewhere in the tracks’ depths, resulting in visceral alternative editions of the originals’ horizontal haze. Even so, you end up wishing that Dunis and Coyes had opted to set sails towards the bass-saturated overdrive of their exhilarating live shows instead of further amplifying the blurred edges and smoky disorientation that were plentiful to begin with.

Listen to Lucifer in Dub