Opening your third album with a track entitled 'Paint Drying' is a hostage to fortune and, for the increasingly minimalist and ambient Peace Flag Ensemble, so it turns out to be. The group’s music derives from pianist Paul Neher’s solo improvisations, mostly economically structured song-like formulations, harmonically conventional and pleasing enough if rather samey in pace and rhythm. Layered onto these, Dalton Lam’s meandering flugelhorn adds ruminative fluency while Mike Thievin’s restrained drumming often provides little more than a 2-4 snare clicktrack. More rarely, tenor sax from Paul Gutheil adds a certain warmth while studio producer Michael Scott Dawson stretches elements of FX and, on closing track 'I Am Not The Gauguin I Used To Be', adds guitar. As on the Saskatchewan band’s previous outings it is the rich-toned bass guitar of Travis Packer that mostly gives character to the overall sound – rhythmically precise and capable both of free wandering and lock-tight unison with Neher’s left hand. The band’s press image seems to be a hasty photoshop collage and, sadly, that feels how the music was assembled, lacking a directive hand to shape those individual contributions. As it is, the results are polite and tidy easy listening but dangerously close to hearing paint drying.