My patience for Pontiak is wearing thin. Still afflicted by a propensity to shunt out new LPs alarmingly often, this fifth entry in two years sees the Virginian blues-doom rockers making the task of recording a follow-up to February’s Sea Voids easier for themselves by essentially making that album again. Now that isn’t an inherently bad strategy; forgoing development in favour of continuity has resulted in a great deal of quality pop music over the years, but Pontiak are not a pop band. Their challengingly trippy voyages through loping hard rock, gloomy feedback ambience and slow acoustic jams advanced between their first four records just enough to keep them interesting. On Living, however, they sound like they are merely covering themselves, as if in lazy fulfilment of an insatiable recording contract forever greedy for “new” material.

By now Pontiak’s tricks are fast becoming tiresome tropes. “Songs” and “tracks” still continue to refuse to map together, one piece stubbornly squirming into the next in defiance of titles or shuffle listening or logic. ‘Young’ is the new ‘Suzerain’ from Sea Voids, an accessible Sabbath- or Zeppelin-lite instrumental riff vehicle used as an opener which lulls the listener into a predictably false sense of security. After the real Pontiak emerges, whole songs still drift by sleepily, sounding like long, atmospheric introductions to more nourishing, songful efforts which never arrive, and the lyrics drop phrases used as titles of wholly different songs, further adding to the sense of disorientation. All these hallmarks were once fresh and invigorating, but repeated so completely and predictably only six months after their use on Sea Voids, here they sound trite and fatigued.

The sum total of the 42 minutes of Living tells us next to nothing about Pontiak, or indeed living, than we did before. Almost every track on this record has a direct – sometimes superior – analogue on a previous one, and it is impossible to recommend these new songs to anyone who has heard those past albums. Once like an out-of-control train, Pontiak today are more like a stationary engine; there is noise and steam and strain, but there has been very little motion.