FLOWER POWER

One might call Flower Power the start of the "no editing" phase of The Flower Kings. Whilst their first two albums (or three albums, if you include Roine Stolt's original The Flower King solo album which brought the project together) were single-disc affairs, Stardust We Are risked stretching out to two discs and by and large succeeded. This seems to have persuaded the band that the more music they could put on a release, the better - hence Flower Power ends up similarly packed.

The Kings seem to have backed off on this approach in later years - with many subsequent studio albums from the mid-2000s onwards either sticking to one CD in length or, if they had the material, sticking the weaker stuff on a bonus CD rather than packaging it in with the main album. At this point, however, they seem to have been confident that they'd be able to do another 130 minute-plus album hot on the heels of their previous one.

The album leads off with the monster epic Garden of Dreams, an almost hour-long track. This is fairly slow in its early sections, but on the whole I think it's worth it: it uses its massive running time to allow itself to build up gradually, and the Kings' compositional style is diverse and wide-ranging enough that whilst there's obviously themes running through the entire thing they can pack a fairly extensive sonic universe into that one song alone.

To be honest, with prog audiences being used to concept albums where the musical themes all run together - think of Dark Side of the Moon, think of Misplaced Childhood, think of Thick As a Brick for crying out loud - the Kings could have probably just said "that's it, that's the album" and just released Garden of Dreams as a one-disc affair, and I think if they had it'd be regarded as a masterpiece, a journey into symphonic prog realms which, unlike far too many retro- prog acts, keeps in mind the full range of sounds and influences that the classic prog acts of the 1970s truly drew on, and able to incorporate influences ranging from Yes to Zappa in their palette.

The remaining 75 minutes of the album consists of various other musical experiments, ranging from proto-prog psychedelia (the Zappa-ish Psychedelic Postcard) to space rock (Hudson River Sirens Call 1998 could almost, if the vocals on it were less operatic, be an early Porcupine Tree piece) and taking various diversions along the way.

I can see why the Flower Kings gathered a loyal following in the late 1990s - it was a time when it was harder to discover new prog bands than it is today, and InsideOut had pretty decent reach with its distribution, and in an era when many fans were feeling starved for prog a two hour plus album would have felt like an embarrassment of riches. Nonetheless, there are times when less is more, and Flower Power illustrates that. Garden of Dreams by itself would be in contention for five stars, or a 50-minute condensation of the best bits of the non-Garden of Dreams songs would be in the running for a similar grade, but as it is I have to give the whole package four stars. If you're a prog fan, there's a lot to like here, but you may find you rarely listen to the whole thing all the way through.