MEET THE FLOWER KINGS - LIVE RECORDING 2003

By the early 2000s The Flower Kings were developing a reputation as The Prog Band Who Doesn't Leave Anything On The Cutting Room Floor - regularly putting out sprawling double-CD albums which crammed as much music as possible onto both discs. Whilst these albums would usually offer you over 2 hours of good music, a little trimming could have dialed most of them back to 90 or so minutes of great music, and I personally thought Unfold The Future took the schtick too far, a slightly forced attempt to go back to that Stardust We Are/Flower Power model after two albums which managed to be pretty good and restrict themselves to a single disc each. (Indeed, I think their best studio album of their 1995-2002 run was The Rainmaker, one of those single-CD affairs.)

So it was some trepidation that I listened to Meet The Flower Kings - a live album with over 2 and a half hours of music, and focused solely on Flower Kings epics - the shortest song here being an over 10 minute rendition of Circus Brimstone from Stardust We Are. A good cross-section of the band's albums are represented - the full half-hour Truth Shall Set You Free is here from Unfold The Future, as is Silent Inferno, the title track from Stardust We Are rounds off the set, you get Humanizzimo from Roine Stolt's The Flower King solo album, and there's a rendition of Garden of Dreams from Flower Power which trims back its epic hour-long length into a comparatively tight 44 minutes.

It's that last point which gave me a sliver of hope - clearly, the Kings were actually willing to trim back the filler, and that's part of what makes this live album such a treat. The other is that the band are both talented enough to pull off these marathon tracks in a live context and manage to inject them with a verve which was sometimes missing from the studio versions. The Unfold the Future material particularly benefits here - they sound like they are actually enjoying themselves, there's a warmth here that was a little missing from that slightly sterile album, and in general it just seems to have a little extra spark to it that the Unfold the Future version was missing.

Sure, it's another 2CD feast, but when it's a live album with a carefully curated setlist that's much less of a burden than when it's a studio CD which is throwing in filler to pad out the length. Nicely, there is almost no overlap in terms of song selection with their previous 2CD live album, Alive On Planet Earth - the only song that appears on both is Stardust We Are, and on Alive On Planet Earth that's a 10 minute cut down version (essentially just part 3 of the whole package), not the full rendition we get here.

Once again I am left substantially more impressed with a live release from the Flower Kings than I was with some of their studio efforts. On the one hand, their talents as live musicians are a thing to applaud. On the other hand, that's more evidence that on their studio albums had a bad habit at this point of time of emphasising quantity over quality.