Never mistake atmosphere for edge. Sure, Joy Division is canonical in part because of the Martin Hannett's skeletal, echoing filtrations, but he had some potent art-punk ingredients to work with. Two Loons For Tea occasionally live up to their Lewis Carrollian name; certainly they're capable of a fun, demented logic. But too much of Nine Lucid Dreams amounts to genre exercise (yes, "Consuela" and "Dixie It Up!" sound just as hopelessly reductive as their titles) or embellished improvisation. And against the ubiquitous beds of cloying strings or aimless guitar noodling, it's not as easy as it should be to lounge in Sarah Scott's soulful croon.

The duo makes dubious claims on a lineage of pioneering greats, from Aphex Twin and Portishead to happy academic freaks like Iannis Xenakis. I don't hear any of the trip-hop stylings they purport (though "Waiting" is an enjoyable R&B number), and as for their supposed "experimental" bent…letting flatly imagined songs float off like a Norse funeral pyre because you never figured out where they were going does not count as serious inquiry: there should really be a live captain handling this boat. Mercifully, there's a diamond in the rough. "Monkey," I would argue, is beyond reproach, catching an acoustic jangle in lockstep until it can slingshot into a fizzy electro-pop chorus that hits every mark on a strength-testing hammer-and-bell county-fair game. Here's hoping that primate stakes a spot on this band's back.