TWILIGHT

Drifting Sun are one of a number of neo-prog bands who, having perhaps not gained that much attention during their original runs, have found both renewed audience interest during their recent reformations and, arguably, are even better than they were first time around.

Take Drifting Sun, who started off in the 1990s playing a style reminiscent of what might have happened had Marillion developed their Fish-era sound in a different direction as opposed to graduating to a new sound under Steve Hogarth, with the On the Rebound album perhaps being the best of their original incarnation. However, since the Trip the Life Fantastic album which revived the project, Drifting Sun's time truly seems to have come, with the band releasing more new albums to greater commercial attention and critical acclaim than they ever enjoyed back in the 1990s.

In particular, I have to give applause to Twilight, representing perhaps the first time that the band's 2010s run has produced an album which not merely matches the high bar set by 1998's classic On the Rebound, but exceeds it. With an appropriately haunting atmosphere, the album resembles what might have happened had Clutching At Straws-era Marillion went in a Victorian Gothic direction. More or less every song on the album has a full on shivers-up-your-spine moment.

Compared to its predecessor, Safe Asylum, the album finds the band diallling down on the heavy rock moments in favour of focusing more on haunting, melancholy atmospheres, and it works a charm. With this, Drifting Sun establish themselves as perhaps the most interesting neo-prog act of the present era.