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 goesthe 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.
Then there's the centrepiece, V (Island Song), which moves from synthy doom-rap to skittery electronica over nine minutes and could only have come from studio boffins with too much time on their hands.
Repeat listens will deliver rewards, but, right now, it feels unlovable.
