Niels' Top 10 Albums of 2017 - Number 10

10. Big Big Train – The Second Brightest Star

Big Big Train pulled a nice stunt this year. Originally, they were going to release an EP called Skylon, as a companion piece to 2016's Foklore album. Instead, they released a full-blown album, on which the Skylon song was nowhere to be found. Later this year, Skylon finally saw the light of day, not as an EP, but as a surprise full-length album rechristened The Second Brightest Star. It all goes to show that Big Big Train is bursting at the seems with talent and creativity right now. They still want to do a career retrospective at some point, but they keep putting it off because they just can't stop writing new material.

The Second Brightest Star contains some fantastic new songs from David Longdon, Greg Spawton and Rachel Hall, including the haunting title track, a jolly folk instrumental and the long-awaited Skylon, an eclectic and beautiful BBT tale of heroic history. It's a particular treat to hear the brass band again, that was missing from Grimspound.

It's not all new material though, as two pieces from Folklore get an extended revamp – the London Plane sequence in particular pops out at me on this album as it didn't do as much on Folklore. Other bits are reprises from melodies found on Grimspound. It's more of a collection of odds and ends rather than a true album in its own right, but it's still more than an EP's worth of great new material.

Is three albums - and a single! - in two years too many? Not if the quality is this consistenly high.