MEET THE FLOWER KINGS @ LIVE RECORDING 2003

If you like the Flower Kings, and especially their epic tracks (up to and including Unfold The Future), then you really should get this DVD. A complete live version of Garden Of Dreams, which is my favorite song of theirs, is performed beautifully. My only complaint being that it is split in two and you can't skip over the "home movie" bits between all the songs. That is really the biggest complaint I have with this DVD. Those bits are okay to watch once or twice, but after that you just end up fast forwarding through them. On a DVD you should be able to skip them entirely. The only other negative is the strange footage of the dancers, bringing back shades of Wakeman ice shows. But they are not used much and don't detract too much from the performance.

Besides the previously mentioned Garden Of Dreams, we get a complete (all 3 parts) version of Stardust We Are, which almost makes this worth having all by itself. Humanizzo is fantastic, as is The Truth..... Silent Inferno comes off really well, and the only not so great track is the jam/Circus Brimstone track. But even that is pretty decent.

There have been complaints that this is not a truly "live" performance. This is accurate. The show was recorded over several hours, where the band did retries of various songs and parts of songs to get the best performance. There were only about 50 people in the audience. A number of overdubs were done after the fact, particularly Hasse Froberg's vocals as he had the flu on the day of shooting. So this does not have the feel that most live DVD's do. But the performance is still essentially live, and because of the method they used to make it, essentially performed flawlessly. For me at least, it works really well. Any fan will be able to enjoy this. Minus one star for the flaws I mentioned earlier, but otherwise a solid 4 stars.

(as an aside, I got the special edition with 2 CDs and fantastic book-like packaging......this actually boosts it up from about 3 1/2 stars......so if you get the regular edition, you might not be as impressed by the packaging)

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