Let's blame the curse of NME. The British hype machine named These New Puritans Album of the Year winners in 2010 with a record that married industrial gloom-rock to lush orchestral arrangements.
Three years later, with barely a squeak, along comes Field of Reeds, the follow-up to Hidden that goes the other way: gone are the pounding drums, taut rhythms, raised hackles.
In their place is the kind of music that soundtracks David Lynch's dreams - spooky soundscapes, random stabs of noise, off-kilter horn riffs and whispered vocals infuse every track.
Occasionally it works, like the Atoms For Peace-aping piano lope of Fragment Two, or the ghostly vocals on Spiral that invoke both a soothing lullaby and a sinister horror film.
But too often Reeds goes out of its way to challenge: Jack Barnett's out-of-tune vocals on Organ Eternal sound like Johnny Rotten attempting to cover The xx, Dream is the sort of weirdness Bjork would reject; Nothing Else is a dodgy orchestral experiment.
