Walls caused a stir with the release of their eponymous debut last year, which offered lush, airy works of synth and guitar over the occasional beats, vocals and the odd field recording. If not always particularly original or developed, this stuff was at least deliciously produced, usually gleaning more from the sum of a limited palette (especially with ‘A Virus Waits’). But to me the album suffered predominantly from having too little substance overall to establish Walls’ identity as something remarkable. Rather like Belong on their album October Language Walls are fond of the idea that the louder a cloudy, fuzzy, emotive electronic piece is the more stirring it will be. Thankfully though, Walls only courted the notion rather than basing an entire full-length on it.
As may be expected the new Walls album, Coracle yields a more focused and refined sound than its predecessor; there are no waiting viruses this time around. Instead on offer are more beat-driven salutes to krautrock, an even thicker mixing style and a significantly lighter mood that is so resolutely sickly-sweet that I feel as if I should brush my teeth after listening. Even the rosy plumes on the cover manage to evoke the sugary wisps of candy floss. Think Primal Scream’s ‘Autobahn 66’ (the title says it all) and you’ve got the basic format of many of this album’s tunes, including initial single ‘Sunporch’ - nearly, in fact, a slower version in the same key. Buoyant and silly, it wears a grin and in some ways employs Walls’ most successful (that is, least tedious) use of vocals thus far in their output. The doctored, percussive utterances on ‘Il Tedesco’ aren’t bad either. Alas that discovery seems to have come too late to rescue a few of the other pieces. Opener ‘In Our Midst’ ambles beneath rubbery chords at an enjoyable tempo, but initially features a set of whimpers so flat and perfunctory as to cause immediate irritation.
There’s nothing lyrical about Walls’ music. On both albums it often goes nowhere; whatever it may be doing, it will just fizzle out eventually. Without the explicit representational aid of metaphor (such as the eternality of the forest for Wolfgang Voigt’s Gas project) this can cause boredom. These tracks are light, transient moments for you to enjoy for a while, an approach to authorship which invites the question of longevity. Yet some of these moments really are good. ‘Vacant’ is a very pleasant piece with a tastefully gentle build-up, and a finish equally so. I’m less sure about ‘Ecstatic Truth’, a woozy summer day of a track that sways around a zone of carefree twitters, twee guitar and thick rolling synths. As if too much of this narcotic sweetness could pose the risk of harm - and I suspect this may be a legitimate concern - the song simply disappears after a time, silenced knife-like by an unknown gesture. Perhaps the duo collapsed into slumber, or were rushed to hospital.