Over successive albums, Leila has been using the talents of a widening pool of guest vocalists to bend her scattershot electronica into song form. By her third album, 2008’s Blood, Looms and Blooms, she was punching above her own public profile and pulling in the powers of Terry Hall and Martina Topley-Bird.

Now, as its title hints, fourth album U&I sees Leila reining in the collaborations and working in tandem with just one other. Step forward Mt. Sims, likewise a veteran of three song-oriented albums of warped electronic pop for International DeeJay Gigolo Records, and no stranger to subsuming himself in collaborations (most recently alongside The Knife and Planningtorock).

The problem with Sims’ vocal contributions to U&I is that he’s working within a rather limited range. This would be less noticeable if the album hadn’t been sequenced with the majority of his turns up front. The skipping, fizzing All of This raises expectations early on, but when the underwhelming Welcome to Your Life and In Consideration follow immediately on its heels, familiarity with Sims’ smeared, downbeat singing quickly sets in.

This is doubly unfortunate because Sims and Leila’s most successful collaborative piece is held back until much later. U&I’s title track is a woozy, queasy fantasy of undersea peoples that taps into the ‘dream within a dream’ sensations that affect us between sleeping and waking. Leila’s light patterns of plucked notes and stuttering vocal fragments are reminiscent of Coil’s out of body music, and showcase the validity of the Mt. Sims team-up better than awkward first single (Disappointed Cloud) Anyway.

U&I’s instrumentals are similarly variable. The gentle colour arcs of Eight and In Motion Slow are absorbing passages of hypnotic tone ambience, whereas Interlace is an ugly two-dimensional splurge of beats and noise.

Despite the focussed collaborative process, U&I is a frustratingly uneven album, but it’s worth digging out the highlights, and hoping for further successes from the pair.

-Stuart Huggett-