SAND

Eeeeh, call it sophomore slump. Monarch Trail's Sand finds the Canadian trio back on the same beat as their debut - charming 1980s-style neo-prog, lousy cover art. Seriously, gang, I get it that commissioning art can be expensive but it's not *that* expensive. Once is twee; twice suggests a lack of pride in your own work.

And though it would be too harsh to say you should just this one by the cover, I do detect a certain complacency creeping into Monarch Trail's schtick here. We're still in the land of solid IQ/Quasar/Pendragon-ish neo-prog here, but the overall package feels hollow somehow. This shows up the most in the title track, a 24 minute epic which seems to be that long solely to tickle the prog community's well-known fetish for long tracks - it's not that it's bad, but it's way overlong for what it is and some of the sections (especially those with vocals) could have been cut to the improvement of the track.

Decent, but not as good as the debut.