Plaid is one of those electronic acts that always leaves you wanting more; not because they have produced a breathtaking back catalogue of music that leaves you salivating, but because you always feel there is further unfulfilled, untapped potential.

Having probably got bored of creating forward-thinking yet fast-becoming benign electronica, the last five years has seen Plaid experiment in the world of soundtrack and music for short films. Scinitilli is the inevitable result of coming out of that and infusing their new-found, broadened experience into writing a new collection of tracks for a more traditional electronic album.

And it all starts so well, with the beautiful Missing - a mesmeric ambient instrumental that blends interloping keys, piano and warm undulating bass tones. Then comes the crunching, almost self-descriptive Eye Robot - full of stilted, mechanised rhythms and warped technoid percussion. A polar opposite to the opening track, it's almost completely devoid of melody and emotion. Meanwhile, the jangling Thank is very much a trademark Plaid track. Playful, arresting and fun, with big juicy pads springing around percolated keys and thudding beats.

Unfortunately, having set the template, Scintilli rather depressingly falters as instrumental after instrumental arrives, alternating between heady, syncopated/beat-based rhythm tracks and pitch-bent atmospherics efforts. Like many electronic acts of the past, that sense of being unable to top past glories soon becomes a problem for the expectant listener. The music is intelligently pieced together, but everything seems slow, functional and, to some extent, over-analysed.

One might think that Plaid seem a little lost, unsure what direction to take and have therefore ended up with an album that falls into no-man's land; lacking the focus and direction that soundtrack-related material tends to offer and merely covering old ground (albeit with new sounds) in terms of producing scattered IDM/electronica. The nineties have long gone, and I hate to say it, but it's very difficult to innovate or surprise with sound anymore - Plaid need to find a new angle; perhaps by integrating an acoustic dimension.

Having said all that, Plaid do what they do best by leaving us dreaming of better things to come on the closing At Last - a chugging slab of soulful electronica, with twisted vocoded vocals winding over shifting beats and mechanised electronic rhythms, lifted by warm, flitting pads and glockenspiel tones. Mesmeric, rhythmic, melodic and eerily nostalgic, this does compete with their best works but it's also everything that the rest of Scintilli should of and could have been, but sadly isn't.