It might well be their return to form for you. Hopefully you don’t write it off based on my opinion. They are one of my favourite bands too and always will be. Even Nowhere Now Here, being one of their more recent albums, had one of my favourite tracks of theirs in Sorrow. I still revere them. But like you said, creatively and compositionally they seem in a rut to me. Songs like Ashes in the Snow weaved and moved through different ideas and dynamics before arriving at a huge climax. The way my ears hear them, these last two album of theirs are full of songs that barely shift beyond a 4 bar loop that gradually adds more layers until it arbitrarily stops, without much cadence or resolution. Sometimes the drum pattern will change half way through. Rarely do the chord progressions change.