THE FLOWER KING: MANIFESTO OF AN ALCHEMIST

There's two albums in Roine Stolt's discography where you could have a little debate as to whether it's really just a Roine Stolt album (or a "Roine Stolt's The Flower King") album, or whether it's a de facto Flower Kings album that happens to be under Roine's name. The first of those is, of course, The Flower King - the initial project where the core personnel decided to take the material on the world and in the process of doing so forged themselves into the first Flower Kings lineup.

This is the second one - which is either Stolt's first solo album since Wall Street Voodoo from 2005 or, looked at another way, a Flower Kings album reduced under a different, slightly clunky project name as a result of Tomas Bodin's reluctance to return to the fold. Sure, much of the material here is actually just played by Roine himself as a multi-instrumentalists, with other personnel dipping in here and there in a guest capacity - but on the other hand, a good chunk of the folk here would go on to be part of the lineup which eventually just reasserted their claim to the name of the Flower Kings once it became apparent that Bodin wasn't going to come back.

Musically speaking, it feels a lot like Stolt's been influenced by his collaborations with his Transatlantic buddy Neal Morse, with Lost America in particular sounding like the sort of thing which might have appeared in a mid-1990s Spock's Beard album from that mildly more commercially-leaning period they had from Beware of Darkness to Day For Night). One thing both Stolt and Morse have long had in common is an appreciation for the sunny sounds of 1960s pop, and Baby Angels feels like a delving into that. On the whole, the Yes influences that had been prominent on prior Flower Kings releases are dialled back somewhat in favour of a tour of prog sounds ranging from fusion to more traditional Flower Kings fare.

On the whole, it's an appealing release but not an exceptional one - something which Flower Kings fans doubtless appreciated when it emerged, but which has perhaps been eclipsed a little by the reformation of the Flower Kings proper.