Following his 2016 outing as one-half of Soft Hair, an uncomfortable pink-glazed detour into seedy synth-funk with co-conspirator LA Priest, displaced Kiwi Connan Mockasin returns to bandleading business with Jassbusters, an eight-song soundtrack to his homemade absurdist five-part melodrama film, Bostyn 'n Dobsyn.

The film's premise centers around the relationship between a music teacher named Bostyn, his band, Jassbusters, and Bostyn's student, Dobsyn.

While this may sound like a rather obtuse project to newcomers, followers of Mockasin's career are likely to receive it with a knowing nod of recognition and perhaps appreciation.

His last solo album, 2013's Caramel, offered a slightly more palatable version of his helium-voiced soft pysch-n-soul with similar dips into conceptual fare (see "It's Your Body," Pts.

1-5).

Performing here in character as the fictional Jassbusters (the band), Mockasin and his real-life collaborators slog through a set of drippy and generally tedious jazz-rock ballads filled with lengthy guitar solos and oblique references to the film's narrative.

The nearly nine-minute opener "Charlotte's Thong," likely a reference to Mockasin collaborator Charlotte Gainsbourg, burbles along pleasantly enough during its front half, but ultimately descends into a mellow fug of bendy uninspired soloing.

The wonky post-midnight sleaze-soul of tracks like "Last Night" and "Con Conn Was Impatient" follow in the same manner, with only the semi-sprightly "B'nD," offering even a midtempo groove, punctuated mid-song by a conversation between Dobsyn and his school principal.

Recorded live in the studio, Jassbusters has enough chops to pull off the kind of slick 70's MOR soft rock that seems to be Mockasin's bailiwick, but as a whole, there's just not a lot to these songs to keep things consistently interesting, and the album comes off as more of an indulgent lark in Mockasin's growing canon.