Author: Peter Podbrežnik
Artist: Flower Kings, The
Label: Import
Release date: 28.10.2013
Length: 59:37
Rating: 4/5
Another year has rolled around, and it’s time for a new The Flower Kings studio album, this time with an unusually feminine title, »Desolation Rose«. ‘Again already?’ you’ll say, given that the previous studio effort, »Banks Of Eden« from 2012, is still fresh in some people’s memory. After a longer break between 2007 and 2012, when they put out no new studio albums at all, the Flower Kings, led by their workaholic patriarch, guitarist and vocalist Roine Stolt (some also know him as a member of the international prog supergroup Transatlantic and a former member of the cult Swedish band Kaipa), have clearly gone back to releasing albums with their old ‘hyper-productive’ zeal, when new studio offerings arrived year after year.
»Desolation Rose«, the twelfth The Flower Kings studio album, picks up in sound, style and message right where »Banks Of Eden« left off. The Swedish merrymakers keep spreading Roine’s ‘flower’ philosophy, and even with the same lineup as on the last album, including the same drummer, Felix Lehrmann, which is certainly lovely and encouraging news for a band that has gone through four drummers in a career of less than twenty years. The structure of the individual compositions, as you’d pretty much always expect from The Flower Kings, stays slyly complex yet emphatically melodic, played at an outstanding virtuoso level, with a heap of instrumental improvisational detours and retro seventies ambient shades, mostly on the keyboards, the domain of Tomas Bodin. It won’t surprise anyone that right out of the gate the ‘flower folk’ hit us with a 13-minute-plus, highly complex epic called »Tower One«, where a well-trained ear will catch plenty of ‘borrowed’ retro elements from prog classics like King Crimson, Yes and Genesis. It’s certainly an ambitious move, but also a nearly expected one that doesn’t bring any great excitement.
It’s perhaps a little ironic that The Flower Kings sound somewhat more interesting this time on the shorter tracks, like the Mellotron-laced »Sleeping Bones«, where the Genesis influences are more than obvious, as are early King Crimson in the harder moments when raw yet mathematically precise guitar phrases push their way to the front. On »Desolation Road«, second guitarist Hasse Froberg shows off his emotional vocal performance and proves that the Flower Kings, even though they’ve always been seen as almost too analytical, virtuoso professors of prog rock, are also masters of subtlety, and at just the right moments, too.
Socially critical lyrics also pop up now and then on some of the »Desolation Rose« tracks, such as »White Tuxedos«, which opens like some lost work by Leonard Cohen before morphing into a fun symphonic prog/hard rock fusion, where you can even detect a slight Deep Purple influence between the arrangements. It’s a witty experiment of the kind the album could have used more of, while the brutal, at times downright prog-metal »Dark Fascist Skies«, where Froberg takes over the vocal baton again, is a sequel to »Bavarian Skies« from the album »Paradox Hotel« (2006). In it Roine voices his concern over the well-known fact that the far right, or neo-Nazis, are spreading their ugly ideas ever more confidently in a sick and exhausted EU, in the middle of an artificially staged economic crisis.
On »The Resurrected Judas« the Flower Kings once again sound like incorrigible idealists who, while reading the poetry of Jon Anderson (ex-Yes), somehow forgot that the hippie days are long gone, yet still go on believing that ‘love conquers all’. This is also where the first interesting instrumental jazz fusion detour happens, lasting until the layered keyboards come crashing in and the ‘flower folk’ sound a lot like the »A Trick Of the Tail«-era Genesis for a while. The super-melodic »The Silent Mases« at moments recalls music for some New Year’s celebration, while the guitar solo escapades and the sarcastic lyrics about the exploitation of factory workers stir up feelings quite different from holiday cheer.
»Last Carnivore« is the heaviest piece on the album, at times almost brutal by usual The Flower Kings standards, with prog metal currents and a more than obvious King Crimson influence, so this time a somewhat gloomier mood takes over for a short while. Roine and the gang make sure with their cheerful vocal-ambient flashes that the ambient gloom doesn’t hang around for too long. The title track is an awakening piece in the style of the old standard »Stardust We Are«, positively glowing with positivist ambient energy and ‘green’ language, the kind that simply can’t be missing from any Flower Kings album. It all wraps up with the pompous »Silent Graveyards«, where that cheerful, awakening motif, already heard earlier on »Desolation Rose« and »The Silent Masses«, comes back once more, while the ending gives a clear sense that the ‘business’ of enlightening the listening masses ‘is far from over’, however sarcastic that may sound.
»Desolation Rose« is a classic The Flower Kings album, made exactly to the wishes and expectations of most longtime fans, i.e. by the trusty formula that earned them a reputation as one of the most interesting and important prog rock outfits of the nineties, with the welcome twist that this time the album as a whole sounds more cohesive than it usually has in the last few years. Another noticeable change is that they sound a touch more aggressive and less cheerful than usual, yet you’ll find few prog positivists in the 21st century as incorrigible as Mr. Stolt and his ‘flower’ crew. Maybe it wouldn’t hurt the Flower Kings to consider taking a few more risks on their next studio project and trying some more radical change in sound, maybe by bringing in a new additional singer, as they once did, admittedly not too successfully, with Daniel Gildenlöw (Pain of Salvation). They badly need some kind of refreshing infusion, since their songwriting ideas, always played at a top-notch level, are getting far too predictable.
Line-up
Roine Stolt – vocals and guitar
Hasse Fröberg – vocals and guitar
Jonas Reingold – bass guitar
Tomas Bodin – keyboards
Felix Lehrmann – drums and percussion
Production
Roine Stolt
Track list
1. Tower One (13:39)
2. Sleeping Bones (4:16)
3. Desolation Road (4:00)
4. White Tuxedos (6:30)
5. The Resurrected Judas (8:24)
6. Silent Masses (6:17)
7. Last Carnivore (4:22)
8. Dark Fascist Skies (6:05)
9. Blood Of Eden (3:12)
10. Silent Graveyards (2:52)
