Album Review: The Flower Kings - Waiting For Miracles

Sometimes, I wish prog wasn't as confusing as the music itself can be. Take The Flower Kings as an example. A few years back, they had revitalized their career with a couple of good albums, and then they disappeared. There were some rumors about rancor in the group, and Roine Stolt stepped out to make a solo album under the name of Roine Stolt's The Flower King (gee, I wonder why he called it that....), and now they're back again. And the weirdest part is that they've never bothered to let anyone know why they disappeared, why they're back, or why things have changed. We're left sitting here in the dark, not knowing anything, other than the fact that another long album is ready for us.

This time around, the band is restrained, as much as they can be. These fifteen songs (only twelve are 'real songs') all clock in at less than ten minutes, thankfully saving us from having to sit through another half-hour long epic. I have found that my patience for such things has been dropping precipitously as I get older. Maybe I've just heard too many bad ones to waste that much time on a single song.

But even in more condensed pieces, The Flower Kings are not about being straight-to-the-point. They don't write songs so much as put together movements. There are a couple of melodies that will tie it all together, but even a shorter song of theirs tends to wander around the axis, indulging whatever whim Roine and company had at the moment. That gives their music a live, improvisational feeling, but it also means it can be a chore to sit through if you aren't ready to be detoured this many times. I suppose that's why I liked "Desolation Rose" as much as I did; the nature of that record forced them into a bit more structure.

Let's look at the first real song on the album, "Black Flag". It clocks in a shade under eight minutes, but there are only a few vocals during that time. The majority of the song is a string of instrumental themes that ebb and flow, but branch off without ever returning to the main road. Musicians can find it entertaining and interesting to play music that never repeats, to challenge themselves to always keep moving, but listeners like having a hook they can come back to. There's a reason why the conventional song structure exists. That's what works, and while I'm all for taking diversions from time to time, wandering into the desert without a map isn't a solid plan.

The biggest problem I have with the record is that when they take these paths, there aren't enough big, bold, interesting ideas to keep me interested. There are a lot, and I mean a lot, of instrumental passages, and almost none of them contain any themes or playing that stick in your head. You don't have to have the main vocal by the hook of the song, but you have to have something, and so many of these songs have nice playing. But what is nice? It's a word we usually use to describe something pleasant we aren't really excited about. That's what The Flower Kings are.

Everything about this record is pleasant. The production is warm and... pleasant. The playing is diverse and... pleasant. The melodies are smooth and... pleasant. Everything is nice, but there isn't a single riff, or vocal, or moment I would say I ever need to hear again. It all goes in one ear and out the other. Everyone does a lot of playing, but it doesn't amount to anything.

The other thing is that this is an incredibly soft album. I know The Flower Kings never rocked very hard, but an album of this length can't be this slow, and this soft, for this long. It loses my attention many times as it moves along, and the experience of trying to stay engaged with an album that isn't giving me a reason to, is quite frustrating. When we get to "Ascending To The Stars", we're treated to nearly six minutes of instrumental work that spends nearly half that time merely building up to the point of the track. When I have probably a dozen other new records I could be listening to instead, I can't be asked to spend so much time waiting for something to happen.

Ultimately, what we have here is twenty or thirty minutes of lovely prog that gets bloated into over an hour. If that sounds like your cup of tea, enjoy yourself. I was alternately bored, frustrated, and depressed listening to an album that delivered me little more than a reason to keep looking at my very beautiful watch. Thanks for that, Roine, I guess.