ALIVE ON PLANET EARTH

The Flower Kings' first live album might well be a stronger release than any of the run of albums from Back To the World of Adventures to Flower Power, simply because it finds them picking out the brightest gems of the band's early albums plus some non-album cuts: mean cover of The Lamb Lies Down On Broadway, a repurposed extract from Kaipa's Inget Nytt Under Solen given the translated title of Nothing New Under the Sun, and a band rendition of a Tomas Bodin solo track, Three Stories.

The set's running hour of just under two hours is actually shorter than Stardust We Are and Flower Power, but it's more than enough to offer a fairly satisfying listening experience which generally goes for a no-filler approach. The album does not present a single complete show with disc 1 providing highlights of a September 1998 appearance in the US and disc 2 derived from a Japanese concert in March 1999, but those dates are close enough together that the setlist doesn't appear to have changed too radically in the intervening time and, of course, the lineup is the same at both shows, so generally the two discs flow together well.

One thing to note is that - unless I've goofed and missed something - there's nothing on here from Flower Power. The Japan gig was recorded after Flower Power was recorded, but before it was released, so there may be a function here of the band opting to keep the powder dry as far as that material was concerned (checking setlist.fm suggests they played an extract from Garden of Dreams, and that's it). This actually avoids a dilemma, since by far the best composition on Flower Power is Garden of Dreams itself - but that monster track is an hour long! Even if the band did play the full thing live, you wouldn't be able to fit it into this set without either adding a third disc (at the risk of causing the listener's attention to flag) or losing a big chunk of the other material.

The Flower Kings have made a point from the start of playing technically challenging material in the studio, and Alive On Planet Earth reveals that they were more than capable even this early in their career of reproducing that onstage. Simply because of the all-killer-no-filler approach when it comes to the band's own material and some sly selections of Kaipa, solo material, and cover versions to spruce things up, I have to say I find it more consistent than any of their 1990s studio albums, though I hasten to add that I don't intend to knock those albums - I just dig this live release that much.