2013’s lean, tough-minded Electric is a self-conscious attempt on Thompson’s behalf to showcase his considerable talents at bare-knuckled blues and stripped-down pub rock, a gambit that ultimately proves less gratifying than it sounds on paper. To be certain, the guitar work on tracks like the lascivious opener “Salford Sunday” and union-sympathizing “Stuck On The Treadmill” is unimpeachably accomplished, but the songs themselves frequently feel like a nothing more than a clever pretext for Thompson to go nuts. Minor-key dirges like “My Enemy” and the Alison Krauss duet “The Snow Goose” are fine compositions by the standards of most artists, but feel strangely perfunctory coming from an artist who has plowed this same terrain to far greater effect. The standout closer, “I’m Saving The Good Stuff For You,” is the closest thing to a Thompson classic — a comical, ruminative and semi-apologetic acknowledgement for his renegade past, musically and thematically similar to Bob Dylan’s late-career masterpiece “Mississippi” (Sample lyric: “I’ve had wives and I’ve treated them all badly/ Maybe a lover or two/ All the time oh I didn’t know it/ I was saving the good stuff for you.”) To be clear, nothing here is embarrassing, and quite a lot of it is highly worthwhile. But it is paradoxically the air of overarching competence that can make so many of Thompson’s later records feel frustratingly indistinguishable.