Finnish producer Sasu Ripatti’s first two albums under his Luomo alias seemed to proceed in a straight line away from the thing he was best known for. Vocalcity, in 2000, was a deep-house reaction to the ambient dub of Vladislav Delay, his chief project, while 2003’s The Present Lover took the Luomo sound towards pop and R&B. Three years later, though, Ripatti followed those two steps forward with one giant step back to the centre of his sweet spot. On Paper Tigers, Luomo remains the most melodic of Ripatti’s aliases; he experiments with silky house-diva vocals on “Really Don’t Mind” and fleshes out the brittle electronics of “The Tease Is Over” with bluesy torch singing. But those moments are outliers on an album that prefers to retreat to the shadows. Like a rising tide, Ripatti’s dub predilections surface in track after track, eroding the edges of his drum programming and suffusing the vocals in echo and delay.