How does a band earn the right to make an average album? Obviously there are hundreds of thousands of downright fucking terrible records out there, but if you are a band with a certain, above-average degree of talent and originality, might there be an instant where it’s excusable to just do what you know you can do well and not continue the thrilling developmental trajectory that has helped you gain fans in the first place? In many ways, the question is moot (a lot of bands simply stagnate creatively, or are rushed by their label, or just feel comfortable with their sound), but it is justified because unused potential is one of the most frustrating things about being a musician (or, dare we say it, being human?).

Les Savy Fav, the popular art-punk-rock outfit from Rhode Island, US, released what many believed to be their defining record in 2007. Let’s Stay Friends was at once play and purposeful, light-footed and heavy, danceable and so punk rock all it was missing was a guest appearance from Ian McKaye (in fact, he was about the only one not to appear on it – check the contributors’ list on Wikipedia). Their new offering, Roots for Ruin, has been produced by the same dude (Chris Zane – also responsible for albums by Passion Pit, Asobi Seksu and The Boggs) and has much of the muscle of its predecessor, but only little of its guile.

Opening track ‘Appetites’ is a pleasantly abrasive and noisy, hormonally driven (“We swell up like dicks in the heart of the night”) piece of art punk that shows that LSF’s guitarists, Seth Jabour and Andrew Reuland, are still one of the most skilful double acts in indie rock. The single ‘Lips N Stuff’ is similarly charged with counterpoint guitar lines and bounces around like a bare ballsack on a trampoline. Frontman Tim Harrington’s lyrics are as intriguing and layered as ever – ‘My body is a book and you’ve been thumbing every page’, ‘Let’s pretend we’re innocent/We’re just friends with benefits’ – but there is an odd lack of experimentalism and freshness that is hard to pin down. ‘Dear Crutches’ intro recalls the band’s monster-hit ‘The Sweat Descends’ but is a harmless ditty rather than a chest-slapping stomper.

The band’s influences have in the past been a kind of ‘Who’s who’ of indie rock – the hard-nosedness of the early Pixies, the sonic breadth of Mission Of Burma – and on Roots for Ruin, there is a little homage to Watford post-punk legends Wire with the throbbing, discordant ‘Poltergeist’. This, however, is followed by ‘High and Unhinged’, another inconsequential exercise in quirkiness (are those… DJ scratches in the background?).

Les Savy Fav have the aforementioned talent in spades and have developed a sort of template for producing good (often great) songs. And while this is an admirable achievement itself, it doesn’t mean that they should be content with just doing the minimum. Roots for Ruin rather sounds like they did just that.