ISLANDS

Islands is the Flower Kings' pandemic album - with basic tracks recorded in August 2020. It's one of those releases where, in part, the ability of artists to put out material under challenging circumstances was the actually important part of the equation, and the quality of the material in question may have been considered secondary to that.

However, the constraints of remote working seems to have left to some interesting shifts in their approach. Sure - it's another double CD album. But it isn't actually as massively overstuffed as some of their two-CD releases of the past - at 92 minutes and change, it's actually comparatively terse next to those two hour monsters. This tracks through to the length of the compositions - nothing breaks the 10 minute mark, and the 9 minute and 10 seconds Solaris is kind of an outlier as far as song length goes.

The approach here seems to have been to cook up shorter, more compact tunes, which perhaps may have proved easier under the circumstances but also seems to have been a genuinely useful creative exercise, forcing the Kings to look at their musical ideas and think hard about how much space they really need to get the point across. Given the tendency of the group to go over-long or to let ideas repeat themselves to the point of irritation in shakier moments in the past, this is a decidedly welcome development.

Add to this a return of the Zappa-esque playfulness of early years, and what you get here is a hopeful, sunny 2CD Flower Kings album like you remember from the 1990s, but with the fat trimmed away. You might bemoan that it took complete societal disruption to prompt them to try this, but I'd prefer to simply be glad that it happened.