Artful Winnipeg quintet Royal Canoe return with Sidelining, their fifth full-length album. Now over a decade into their career, the band have earned a reputation for intelligent, hyper-detailed production and a seemingly endless genre mishmash that continually serves to banish them out into the pop hinterlands. If there is any consistency within this group, it's their stubborn refusal to cohere and fully develop their best ideas, which is quite frustrating given their obvious talent. As with Royal Canoe's previous efforts, Sidelining comes across as a braided river of competing parts and concepts that occasionally unites into a single tributary. For this set, an intentional decision was made to eschew any pre-existing ideas and enter the studio with an entirely blank slate. Improvising and writing together in the studio can be a risky but rewarding endeavor for any band, but when your Achilles' heel is a lack of focus, some strong leadership would go a long way. In this case, the approach more or less results in Royal Canoe sounding like Royal Canoe. The title-track opener benefits from a minimalist dark groove and rather bewitching melody, but from there the album splinters into the group's trademark nest of stuttering rhythms, vocoder abuse, loungey electro-soul, and idea-board pastiche. There are plenty of cool sounds and samples to be heard, especially on cuts like "Summer Stay" and the skittering, robotic "HAL." Still, Royal Canoe are no closer to cohesion than before and sound like a group of talented producers looking for a song.