Recently, I was lying on my living room floor, eyes shut, listening to another one of my assigned albums to review. Lo, I thought to myself, this would be a prime way to take in Leon Dufficy’s latest solo outing under his Winter Drones guise, Heavy Eyes. I was right – this is music that demands single sensory attention, lest it waft into the background of whatever else you may be tending to. For those unfamiliar, Leon Dufficy is most likely better known as the guitarist of dream-pop outfit, Still Corners, and he works out his experimental kicks unfettered as Winter Drones.

Dufficy’s first release, 2011’s Blood In The Coffin, is as you’d expect it to be with that title, a striking, loud, and, at turns, ghastly and evil, affair. It’s centerpiece, the 10-plus minute “Stiff Wizard”, has Dufficy sounding as if he’s launching a smothering blitzkrieg from the bowels of hell. Now, Heavy Eyes, on the other hand, is also as you’d expect it to be with its title, an often somnambulant excursion floating between wakeful and asleep. Accordingly, Heavy Eyes acquits itself as more conventional and accessible than Blood In The Coffin, yet no less difficult to handle. Instead of grappling with Dufficy’s demanding, and often harsh, soundscapes of the debut, it’s the abundance of patience required to stick with the longer tracks and distinguish their nuances.

When it comes to instrumental music, for Yours Truly, it’s a matter of what am I getting out of it, what do I think I am supposed to be getting out of it? Obviously, lyrics often direct the listener to what the artist intends the song to be about, even the more elliptical and inscrutable ones still predispose us some direction or another. To these ears and this brain, particularly given the album’s title, Dufficy has constructed an aural diorama of a sleep cycle. “Eyes Of Sunshine”s delicate arpeggios wind amidst one of Dufficy’s trademark swirling drones; its melody is tinged with a whiff of Simon & Garfunkel’s “Scarborough Fair”, albeit in slow-motion, as it crescendos to a march toward the nether regions of consciousness.

“Ignore The Night” is squarely situated in dreamland; a Spectoresque wall of sound coats its molasses-footed stroll as Dufficy’s vocals are obscured to the point of incomprehension. “Kidneys” seeps in and out of existence while, interestingly, the low-end carries what semblance of melody it has beneath its subtly shifting and churning sea of feedback while “Bong’s Dream Pt. 2” plays nearly the absolute inverse of its “first-half” sibling from Blood In The Coffin, entering with glistening guitar pickings and exiting on bellowing hum. Betwixt them is the uncharacteristically kinetic “Towns Alight”, the most straight-laced track here, built on a nimble psych riff and propulsive tom beat. “She Was A Ghost Of Herself” closes Heavy Eyes out with arms reaching toward the light of consciousness on its chiming and glistening synth pattern.

Taken in its entirety, however, Heavy Eyes falls prey to a paradoxical problem. At a brief 34-minute run time, the inertia of the lengthier, more static tracks overwhelms the infrequency of movement found in their intervening slots. Ironically, the album would be better served committing to one style or another, or going absolute gonzo by, say, doubling the run time to create a more sprawling, kitchen-sink like arena to accommodate all of Dufficy’s ideas. Ambition and eclecticism is almost always laudable – Dufficy has both and they are certainly commendable here, now all he needs is to do is marinade it all into a succulent whole.