His grandfather may be legendary film composer John Williams, but you can’t imagine Lionel “Vinyl” Williams soundtracking the travails of velociraptors or X-Wing pilots, unless it’s for a scene in a pop-up cronut bar on Tatooine. He trades in on-trend dreampop, and as the dreams of others tend to be, it’s intermittently intriguing but hard to get excited about. The strongest tracks, such as Gold Lodge, echo James Pants’ grubby funk or Stereolab’s music for moonbase lounge lizards, with their supple basslines and cooing vocals. But there are stretches of inertia. Williams uses reverb as sparkling chaff to distract from his lack of melodic ideas, and he forgets that psychedelia needs the threat of a bad trip to make the good ones really worthwhile – by the very polite motorik of Xol Rumi you’ll be reaching for some white noise to cleanse your palate.
