Label: Insideout Music
Release date: 16. 11. 1999
Production: The Flower Kings
Album length: 141.07 min (2CD)
Genre: Progressive Rock
Rating: 7.5/10
“Flower Power” was the fourth studio outing from Swedish prog revivalists The Flower Kings and their second double concept album after its predecessor “Stardust We Are” (1997). It was also their first record for Inside Out Music and the last one with bassist Michael Stolt, brother of band chieftain Roine Stolt, who was replaced soon after the “Flower Power” tour by the more established and more talented Jonas Reingold.
“Flower Power” was one of the most ambitious projects in The Flower Kings’ history up to that point, packing in almost two and a half hours of music, with the first disc featuring a composition over an hour long called “Garden of Dreams”. That suite was split into a whopping eighteen interconnected parts, wildly varied in style. Even though the suite was set up as a concept piece, you won’t find a real concept in it, just a heap of absurd lyrics with no rhyme or reason. That’s the first problem weighing this album down and keeping it out of the elite of The Flower Kings’ output.
“Garden of Dreams”, the title track of that hour-plus compositional ‘jigsaw puzzle’, is a slightly exhausting ballad that, thanks to its goofy effects, sounds at times like music for a kids’ TV show. Sadly, “Flower Power” has quite a few similar space-fillers with absurd lyrics, so there’s no point listing them all. “Don’t Let The d’Evil In” has a riff almost identical to the one in the King Crimson classics “Circus” and “Dinousaur”, even though it’s mostly a hard rock affair that sounds a bit like modern-day Deep Purple. “Love Is The Word” grabs your attention mainly with its excellent vocal harmonies and a closing acoustic guitar solo.
And that wasn’t all when it comes to the astronomical amount of music, and that’s already on the first disc, since three more compositions sit at the end of it. Of those, the excellent “Astral Dog” is the only one really worth mentioning and may even deserve the title of best track on “Flower Power”. Throughout “Flower Power”, The Flower Kings play around, with mixed results, with elements of symphonic prog (as usual, the lion’s share), pop rock, art rock, jazz rock fusion and hard rock. They often mash these together into complex ‘stews’, of which only a handful leave a deeper impression.
The second disc has roughly the same amount of music and unconnected compositions, two of which are epics over ten minutes long, “Deaf, Numb & Blind” and “Calling Home”. Apart from the aforementioned “Deaf, Numb & Blind”, plus “Power of Kindness”, “Corruption” and “Painter”, the rest of the second disc is barely worth mentioning and would have made more sense as bonus material on future The Flower Kings albums. From “Flower Power” onward, The Flower Kings started catching plenty of criticism, even from some of their own followers, who were rightly bothered by the instrumental ‘fillers’ of under two minutes, or even under one minute, used to pad out the running time, and by the band’s poor control over which tracks actually deserve a place on an album.
All of this meant that only some of the compositions on “Flower Power” became popular live standards, while the rest quickly faded into oblivion. Sometimes the ‘flower kings’ simply get carried away too far when creating absurd moments and letting their Scandinavian eccentricity loose on “Flower Power”. With the short instrumentals of varying quality, titled “Attack of the Monster Brie”, “Mr Hope Goes to Wall Street”, “Captain Capstan” and so on, you just don’t know whether to laugh or cry.
The tracks “Business Vamp” and the ballad-leaning “All You Can Save”, which ends with an excellent, heart-wrenching Stolt guitar solo, are examples of superbly arranged, meaningful compositions. With a more rational songwriting policy there could have been more of them on “Flower Power”, instead of a swarm of short fillers with no real substance.
“Flower Power” is an album of many contradictions and contrasts, and thanks to its colossal running time it’s not an easy bite even for the most devoted fans of the ‘Flower Kings’. The project would most likely have come across far more convincingly had The Flower Kings released it as two separate albums, since there is simply too much music and the quality compositions often get ‘drowned’ among the pile of unserious pieces surrounding them. It feels like the band couldn’t decide how to separate the good songs from the ballast, so they just threw everything onto one noticeably overlong album. You can’t argue with the fact that, apart from the under-a-minute or two-minute goofing around, everything is played at a top-notch level, yet only a handful of compositions stay with you for long after listening to “Flower Power”, and that’s the main reason it can’t be ranked among the best achievements of these Swedish musical positivists.
Author: Peter “Dr. ProgRock” Podbrežnik
Tracklist:
CD 1 (68:13)
– The Garden of Dreams (59:25) :
1. Dawn (1:33)
2. Simple Song (1:48)
3. Business Vamp (5:03)
4. All You Can Save (5:02)
5. Attack of the Monster Briefcase (3:04)
6. Mr. Hope Goes to Wall Street (1:47)
7. Did I Tell You (3:46)
8. Garden of Dreams (2:40)
9. Don’t Let the d’Evil In (3:12)
10. Love Is the Word (2:50)
11. There’s No Such Night (2:43)
12. The Mean Machine (2:42)
13. Dungeon of the Deep (4:25)
14. Indian Summer (4:14)
15. Sunny Lane (5:26)
16. Gardens Revisited (2:57)
17. Shadowland (2:04)
18. The Final Deal (4:10)
19. Captain Capstan (0:45)
20. IKEA by Night (0:04)
21. Astral Dog (7:59)
CD 2 (72:54)
1. Deaf, Numb & Blind (11:11)
2. Stupid Girl (6:50)
3. Corruption (5:55)
4. Power of Kindness (4:24)
5. Psychedelic Postcard (8:43)
6. Hudson River Sirens Call 1998 (4:47)
7. Magic Pie (8:20)
8. Painter (6:50)
9. Calling Home (11:20)
10. Afterlife (4:35)
Line-up:
Hasse Fröberg – vocals, backing vocals
Roine Stolt – electric and acoustic guitars, keyboards, vocals
Tomas Bodin – keyboards (album mix)
Michael Stolt – bass guitar
Jaime Salazar – drums, percussion
Hasse Bruniusson – percussion, ‘wacky’ voices
