It’s difficult to get a precise hold on Walls. The duo does a prickly minimal-abstract house with an added dose of displacement. That beatific album-art gels nice and smoothly with their Kompakt brethren, but it’s hard to picture them on a Total comp. The tracks on their second record Coracle do not have that impeccably-sequenced sheen of their label’s touted pop-ambient alchemy; instead these tunes feel somewhat out of reach. Whether that’s an intriguing or frustrating effect is up to the beholder.

Their closest comparison lies somewhere between The Field’s seduced, headnod trances and the ethereal edges to Aphex Twin’s landmark Selected Ambient Works. The tendrils of these songs are all flared out in lightly-hued atmospheria – the fact that they’re anchored to a distant beat is tertiary at best. There are a lot of gentle oscillations, sunset-euphoria, and zinging, pleasure-center synths, but not a whole lot of meat. The running time is generally made of songs like ‘Drunken Galleon’ – empty, cleansed, with just enough propulsion to be called a song.

This strain of electronic music is kinda defined by floating vibes, but occasionally Walls can look a little lazy. The sound-soup of ‘Heat Haze,’ ‘Vacant,’ and ‘Ecstatic Truth’ never coalesce in the way the duo ostensibly hopes they do. Instead it comes off like a congestion of hanging elements; unattached ideas trying to figure out exactly what their purpose is. For a record that aims for loose bliss, the result is annoyingly, and flatly aloof.

Writing about records like these is almost always difficult – requiring a lot of spins and rock-upturning and “maybe if I just pay attention to the drums” internal analysis, eventually hands hit the air in a fed-up salute. Coracle refuses to reveal itself to me, and perhaps that’s a personal problem. It has not been an uplifting nor a damning experience; just a fruitless, redundant slam into all the potential ways I might not be listening “correctly.” If you’re the type of person who’s reading The Line of Best Fit you’re probably used to this type of irritation, perhaps you have the key perception to make Walls great – the rest of us will remain alarmingly unfazed.