It would appear that Dan Reeves - Cold Pumas’ guitarist and the man behind the curtain of the Faux Discx label - has a lot to say, judging by the torrent of material he’s sliding under our noses at the moment. With the debut of Cold Pumas recently dropped, and a burgeoning record label to take care of, he now also releases the first album from his solo side project The Soft Walls, which he took nine months to create, recording and mixing it in between sessions for Cold Pumas. Coming in at a scant thirty minutes, what he has created is an ambient smorgasbord, with timid psychedelia, rumbles of lo-fi krautrock and a dappling of found sounds.

The whole album is pretty delicate sounding, with minimal distraction from the focal drones and a highly ambient feel in the spaced-out, fuzzy greyness. Pained vocals lie submerged under a torrent of static in ‘Best If I Go’ and 30-second getaways ‘Soft Walls’ and ‘King Of Calm’ are faint, directionless murmurings. Maybe there’s an suggestion of over-production drowning the more exciting elements of the LP, or maybe it’s a hip slacker apathy weakening the pace, but the album still works as an interesting portion of ambience.

Fronted by a shivering, skeletal motif, ‘Black Cat’ lollops and lunges with the dexterity of a dyspraxic kitten. There’s definite movement, but in odd, almost wrong places and there’s a steely resolve in the drone, masking the imperfect stings of icy strings. Reeves’ hazy vocals work to humanise the clockwork golem he’s created in the music, giving a layer of fragility to the otherwise stern backing. ‘Can’t Decide’ takes a sliver of white-noise garage, and carelessly chugs chords/tuneless singing into the ether on what is potentially the gutsiest effort on the record. Everything jars. It’s scarcely ambient, too dissonant to be anything-pop, but still somehow manages to be something you can’t tear your ears away from. This sort of thing is the hipster equivalent of doom-metal – it’s addictive, emaciated noise.

‘Casual Throne’ wobbles into frame, with muffled artillery barrage thomps of percussion and a cyclic array of synths seeping underneath the ethereal wisps of singing. Occasionally, guitars wail in agony over it all. As with most of the album, it’s a minimal cut which borders the line between self-indulgence and genius ambience. ‘House Concern’ skitters towards the fray with house beats and a sporadic “ting” of tuned percussion. It’s a six-minute opus, evolving before us with slow rises and hypnotic burbles of swollen synth, which starts as unceremoniously as it stops.

The Soft Walls doesn’t exactly break new ground, but this is one of the rare moments where an artist has got it so wrong and so right at the same time. There are cringing moments of ambiguous dissonance, and sometimes there’s a careless disregard of the listener. However, despite the apparent lack of substance, Reeves does manage to create a superbly atmospheric record; it’s serene, gorgeous background music, written for these windswept November dawns and the smoggy greyscale of urban life.

Listen to The Soft Walls