Artist: Walls
Album: Coracle
Label: Kompakt
Release Date: 26/9/2011
Then acclaimed live act Battles invited the pair, AKA Alessio Natalizia and Sam Willis, on a tour of the US. And now Walls are back with a similarly impressive long player, offering another batch of epic techno and sunrise electronica; a package prepared with impressive speed over the 12 months or so since the first installment arrived.
Production details to one side the aural contents of this seven-track-strong collection are equally worthy of note. It's a disc made up of blissful soundscapes that are unquestionably pleasing to the ear, but while referencing the likes of Explosions In the Sky, not least in the delicately strummed guitar melody of Ecstatic Truth, there's a lot more going on here than simple downbeats.
Sunporch, for example, opens with an ethereal vocal refrain atop a gradually growing and grooving kick, bass and hi hat combination. Soon things settle down into what could best be described as a proggy groover, all soaring harmonies over voices set to mainroom drums. Think Sasha getting started and you won't be too far off the mark.
There are plenty more tracks that forsake the couch for a dancefloor too, which is one of the unique aspects of Walls' ethic. Because while crystalline chimes form the core of Vacant, a lush, textured piece of exceptional ambient work, just moments before we were chugging along to the festival-field-filling arrangements of Il Tedesco, a tune made up of horns, lyrical stabs and a wide-load baritone as big as it is dubby.
All of which isn't to say that closing number Drunken Galleon won't provide a lasting memory that's the perfect summary of this album. It's beatless, emotive, opiate, and ultimately best described as powerfully intimate. Marrying a sound that borders on acoustic with something akin to the live acts of house, prog, and techno's more uplifting past may be unexpected, but here it's also shown to be engaging. And, when done like this, provides an essential combination of upbeat and downtempo scores with which to remember a summer spent at beach parties, while looking to the advancing winter and its darkened venues.
