Hazy, drenched in orchestral strings and coming in short at a blissful twenty-something minutes, it's a somewhat frustrating album, however: excellent chill-out music except that you generally need to chill-out for longer than this, perfect background music for the indie dinner party as long as you're only planning on serving one course.

What there is of it, though, is small but perfectly formed. Ranging from instrumental, to using voices as instruments in tracks whose lyrics can't really be discerned, to songs with proper words (heard most clearly on Easy, a radio-friendly pebble to please Flaming Lips fans). More recently, bands such as Blackbright Morning Light and Yorios have ploughed the same furlough.

You Don't Know What I Know adds a heartbeat bass line to underpin the delicate beauty of the earlier songs. It's a hymn to anyone who's kept a foot in the doors of perception, the kind of music through which, if you close your eyes and concentrate on your breathing, you'll be allowed a brief glimpse back through the keyhole.

All of this is much what you'd expect of an album lent vocals by A Girl Called Eddy and Emma McGlynn, produced by Julian Simmons who counts both of them - as well as Guillemots and Midlake - amongst his repertoire. The psychedelic influences are gently West Coast, running their fingers down the G-spots of today's sonic cathedrals before going home to plunder the quieter moments of Love and Gram Parsons, particularly on Rope Walking.

Beautiful as it is, where Ahead Of The Rain fails to lift itself above the average is in its lack of substance. When the music is so gossamer light, we could do with a little more of it: twenty minutes is too short a time to fit in eight tracks unless you're adrenelin-fueled speed freak punks. As a result, it's all a bit insubstantial, leaving you wanting more not because it was so good but because you feel you haven't yet had enough.

In the modern world of downloads and MP3s, there's no reason for albums to be stuck into a rut of 40-45 minute conformity but at the same time if you're going to short-change the listener, you really need to have a good reason why and The High Wire don't. Let's hope their live performances are more substantial.

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