PLANET JUNKIE

The latest Drifting Sun album, Planet Junkie, feels like a bit of a transitional release for the resurgent neo-proggers. From their comeback album (Trip the Life Fantastic) to 2017's Twilight, which I consider to be the band's masterpiece, Drifting Sun enjoyed the services of Peter Falconer on lead vocals, but he is absent from this release.

In interviews, Pat Sanders (the band's keyboardist and sole consistent member lynchpin over all its incarnations) has explained that this was due to Peter's commitments to his PhD studies making it impossible for him to devote sufficient time to the band, though to my knowledge Falconer himself has not made any public comment to confirm or deny this. Either way, Falconer's departure presents Drifting Sun with a problem; his obvious vocal talents were a significant ingredient in the band's revival, and in addition as lyricist he also helped tie the albums together thematically (with Twilight being a masterful example of this).

Whilst many bands would make recruiting a new permanent lead singer a top priority under such circumstances, holding off on an album release until someone had been recruited, Drifting Sun have adopted a novel strategy here: Planet Junkie is an album of three sections of three songs each (with the instrumentals Life and I Will Be King as palette-cleansers between the sections), and each section has a different vocalist performing songs in a somewhat different style. Marc Atkinson kicks us off with some harder, heavier tracks, Colin Mold takes the second act in a more gentle and haunting direction, whilst Joshua Corum wraps things up with some more whimsical numbers, with album closer Everlasting Creed having a pinch of theatricality to it.

It would perhaps be better to think of Planet Junkie as a triptych of EPs than a single album in its own right; each section is decent enough in its own way, and the album certainly gives Drifting Sun an opportunity to exercise the full range of their talents. At the same time, it's questionable whether this format presents a long-term solution to the departure of Falconer; it very much feels like Drifting Sun are pondering which direction to take their work in next, and are doing us the favour of letting us listen in to their sketches of where they might take things in future.

In short, Planet Junkie might be the weakest album at least since Drifting Sun's 2015 return to action, and might even be the weakest album in their discography. That sounds damning, but given the high standard they have maintained so far, it really isn't: in fact, the album's pretty good for what it is. At the same time, I can't put hand on heart and say that it's particularly compelling either.