Album Review: The Flower Kings - Islands

I should have known this was coming. The Flower Kings have always been a band that cannot edit themselves, that cannot stop from putting out every musical idea they have. Their career is littered with double albums that stretch and rip the limits of my patience. Their last album was not long ago, but the reality of quarantine left them with too much time on their hands, and a year later a new double album is upon us. Does anyone really think they came up with ninety minutes of great, important new material they just had to release all at once? Before ever hitting play, I knew the answer to that was 'no'.

This might be controversial to say, but I'm going to say it anyway; there has never been a double album in music history that wouldn't have been better as a single album. Whether that's due to the length being intolerable to sit through, or having so many songs making it obvious some are far better than others, every double album would benefit from being shorter. This album is no exception to that rule.

If you're putting out ninety minutes of music, you'd damn well better make sure every minute of it is necessary. People don't have the patience to spend that much time listening to mediocrity, and yet that's what The Flower Kings are asking of us. It's not that they are a bad band, or that the songs here are terrible, but there are few that stand out as great music. And since the good bits are swamped by long stretches of tedium, it makes for an album that is a complete chore to try to sit through.

The good news is the band doesn't ask us to endure any more twenty-minute epics, instead giving us a collection of twenty-one shorter tracks, which isn't really a better alternative. That's too many different ideas to present us at once for them not to blend together into a mush of similar fuzzy memories. And within each of those tracks, there are long instrumental introductions, long guitar and keyboard solos, and few melodies that bring everything back to a core song we can remember.

I can't help but contrast their recent work with "Desolation Rose", which was a brief (by their standards) single album that was more focused, and had better and more identifiable songwriting than everything they have done since. When they forced themselves to adhere to some constraints, the results were great. Now that they are indulging their every whim again, I find myself wanting to scream, "WHY?!"

Other than the most devoted of fans, I can't tell you a reason why you should spend an hour and a half of your day listening to this record. Wasting time is a sin in music, and The Flower Kings waste plenty of it here. Even with so much other music here, they still feel the need to include a few two-minute segue tracks. Why? If those guitar solos were so great, why not build a full song around them? What purpose does ninety seconds of noodling really serve?

If you gave me a red pen and let me hack away at this record, I could make a pretty good forty-five minute old-school prog album out of it. But let's face facts; ninety minutes of indulgent prog is simply too much. There isn't enough momentum generated by these songs to justify why all this music needs to be given to us at the same time. There is so much fat to be trimmed, I want to say I hate the album just for the fact it doesn't realize any of its own self-inflicted injuries. There's that old saying, 'brevity is the soul of wit'. It doesn't exactly translate to music, but the idea is the same; get to the point. You need more good ideas the longer you expect us to pay attention.

The Flower Kings have good ideas, but not nearly enough for ninety minutes of my time. Their slow, soft prog is a nap waiting to happen when it's stretched out this long.

And we'll probably get another double album next year, because that's how they operate. Oh joy.