Fourtet’s last record, Rounds, was a skittering, introverted mood piece that was notable for being constantly interesting while you were listening to it and difficult to recall when you weren’t. Twenty five million percussive sounds would whiz around twinkling music boxes, harps and pianos to create a stunning electronic sound scape, but the lack of repetition or distinct melody meant that while it was enthralling at the time of consumption, essentially none of it was officially recorded by my brain. Disappointingly, this meant that a gimmicky rubber ducky squeak from Rounds’ last track, Slow Jam, became stuck as the enduring, sour memory of what was really an impressive and innovative album.

Now, Fourtet’s Kieran Hebdan seems to have made a conscious effort to ensure that his new album, Everything Ecstatic, doesn’t suffer from a similar identity crisis. Firstly, there’s the suggestive title, tipping off the listener as to what emotions they might like to feel when listening in case they can’t decide for themselves. There are song titles – Sun Drums and Soil, Sleep, Eat Food, Have Visions – which scream of drug-culture and hippy-style good times, man. Most definitively, many of the tracks have musical moments that could be recalled and easily discussed by fans. Despite the suggestions of my first paragraph, though, it is hard to tell if this is a good thing.

Take opening track A Joy. Things start with trademark free-jazz drums spliced into some coherency, but soon there’s a frantic, tuneless bassline which takes over mix. Being neither bouncy, squelchy or (I apologise) phat – things I’m under the impression electro-basslines should be – it seems to be included to indicate that Fourtet have moved on to harder terrain, rather than strictly for musical enjoyment. The track itself travels a formidable distance in only three minutes and is amazing percussively, but now I think of it as ‘that track with the stupid bassline’.

Smile Around the Face picks up where the album title left off. Flanged keyboards join Alvin, Simon and Theodore on vocals to solidify the assumption that Hebdan has moved from the cerebral to the celebratory on Everything Ecstatic. The track is pleasant, but the silly sounds at the front of the mix tend to distract from the more subtle whirs and bloops that shift around below them.

Sun Drums and Soil, among other tracks, borrows strongly from Tortoise’s drum-production sensibilities, all demented panning and esoteric complexity, but this tends to be married with extreme amounts of peripheral noise. Static, treated vocals and the sounds of an endless array of miscellaneous trinkets constantly drop in and out. The results are sometimes fascinating, other times nausea-inducing. Turtle, Turtle Up cashes in most successfully on Hebdan trying not to sound like Fourtet, with a Moebius strip bassline and trick-timing snares. Highly appealing, partially due to its uncharacteristic brevity, Turtle, Turtle Up sounds like the most pure distillation of what Hebdan was trying to achieve with Everything Ecstatic. It makes other, longer tracks seems like unfocused exercises in layering rather than the trippy journeys they were surely intended to be.

It is harsh to condemn an album for its failed experiments, and truthfully, Everything Ecstatic is still an adventurous and very competent piece. Tune into any randomly selected 30-second snippet of the album and odds are high you’d be impressed by its complexity and originality. There are frequent moments of beauty, almost constant moments of mind-blowing weirdness. Sadly though, at the end of the day, just like the rubber ducky, I remember the chipmunk voices and the crappy bassline, rather than some pleasingly indecipherable drum fill or ridiculous amalgamation of broken-toy sounds. If Hebdan continues trying to force a distinct personality into his music, he risks destroying the indescribable charisma it naturally contains.