TRIP THE LIFE FANTASTIC

When is a reunion album not a reunion album? 16 years had passed since the previous Drifting Sun album - On the Rebound, which for my money is probably their best effort of the 1990s - when this new release came out, but only Pat Sanders remains of the line-ups that recorded the band's first wave of releases. So far as I can make out, when the original band fragmented Pat ended up with custody of the name - probably because he was one of the founding forces of the group in the first place - and after taking a long break from the industry he decided to give it another go in the 2010s, putting together a new lineup which made its debut here.

In the long run, this seems to have more or less paid off - a steady flow of albums has come out right to this day, gathering a level of critical attention and listener acclaim that had eluded the 1990s incarnation of the group. (I myself rather like Safe Asylum, and rate Twilight as a bona fide classic.) Trip the Life Fantastic, by comparison, feels more like a warm-up effort - an album put out largely to test out the process of both producing their album and bringing it to market in the online DIY era, with material which is entertaining but not especially ambitious.

It's a light and at points somewhat cheesy affair, and when you know that the band come out with more creative and distinctive material later on it's hard not to suspect they were keeping their powder dry and not putting out their best material on this album just in case it crashed and burned. Alternatively, perhaps this lineup was so fresh that they still needed a bit of time to really gel and come up with solid material, and they jumped to make an album a little before they were ready.

Either way, it's alright, but not really better than "alright" - entertaining enough if you like light, unchallenging neo-prog, but few people are likely to get very excited about this. Maybe, at a stretch, you can imagjne a major Drifting Sun fans from their original 1990s run getting hyped up about this back in 2015 when it came out - but now the band's rebirth has picked up more steam and put out superior material, there's little compelling reason to prioritise this album now. With both the best of the new material and their two 1990s albums being comfortably better, Trip the Life Fantastic falls between two stools.