Walls' eponymous 2010 debut album was praised for applying lo-fi pop structures to the kind of slo-mo beats that aligned them with their peers on Kompakt. The duo of Alessio Natalizia (Banjo or Freakout) and Sam Willis (Allez-Allez) have built on those promising beginnings by stretching Walls' sound on Coracle, principally by scraping away all the fuzz and upping the production values. Tracks like "Burnt Sienna" and "Soft Cover People" from the band's debut album flirted with the kind of filmy arrangements that chillwave was founded on, although their disposition toward harder dance music took them far enough away from the genre to escape too many comparisons. Still, it's hard not to feel that the tightening up of their sound on Coracle is a deliberate cutting of the chillwave tether, even though it's a change that feels natural and has forced the duo into functioning in brighter spaces.
One point of interest from that debut record was Walls' propensity for taking Krautrock influences and shaving them down into bite-size chunks; the entire record stopped short at just over 29 minutes. Here, they take the more obvious route and expand those inclinations out and latch them to the sunnier beats that are now firmly within their domain. There is more focus on producing complete songs and less deviation into abstraction here than before, although there are a few welcome moments ("Vacant", "Drunken Galleon") when their fondness for ambient shines through. As such, Coracle is stylistically all over the map, with the pair behind Walls indulging vastly different parts of their personalities through the mostly instrumental tracks.
At the center of the album is "Sunporch", a strapping electro-pop number built around a skeletal Giorgio Moroder throb and pitch-shifted vocal screams. It's telling that Walls are touring with Battles to promote this album, as "Sunporch" is their "Atlas", a great utopian future-pop moment that demonstrates the power to startle that this band occasionally possesses. But whereas "Atlas" felt like a genuine bolt from the blue, "Sunporch" is more of a distant cousin to it, playing out in an alternate reality where Battles have set down a blueprint for all manner of forward-thinking acts. Despite those misgivings it's definitely a step in the right direction, and it's almost equaled in the pretty "Raw Umber/Twilight", which combines Walls' love of setting forlorn shoegazer-y patterns to the grind of old analog bass synths.
There's a sharp contrast between the twin peaks of Coracle and the rest of its material, especially when they try to pointlessly channel Spacemen 3 circa "Honey" and shackle that sound to some perfunctory beats on "Ecstatic Truth". It highlights a danger when groups try to veer too far into eclecticism, where the overall focus of the band is lost amid the desire to keep playing around with the sound. There's little in the way of identity to cling onto, with no shared tropes to bind the sound together, making this feel more like a compilation than a focused work by one act. It demonstrates how big the band's record collections are, and how skilled they are at bringing those influences into their sound, but it leaves the question of who Walls are and what they are trying to achieve frustratingly open.
