ENTERING THE SPECTRA

Entering the Spectra is the debut solo album from The Flower Kings bassist Jonas Reingold. It´s almost wrong to call Entering the Spectra a solo album as both Roine Stolt, Jaime Salazar, Tomas Bodin and Zoltan Czörz from The Flower Kings contribute heavily on the album. This is not a Flower Kings album but sometimes it´s close to being one. There are also a couple of musicians contributing who is and has not been a part of The Flower Kings and it´s mostly from those musicians we hear the surprises. Robert Engstrand ( Dingo) delivers some nice piano work, Johan Glössner delivers some pretty heavy guitars and Göran Edman ( Ex- Yngwie Malmsteen) sings on many of the songs. Roine Stolt also sings on a couple of songs but it is Göran Edman´s hard rock vocals which are dominant on the album. When Göran Edman sings Karmakanic sounds significantly different from The Flower Kings.

Jonas Reingold has composed some really good songs on Entering the Spectra. The style ranges from symphonic prog rock to hard rock to jazz/ Fusion which I know sounds much like the style The Flower Kings play, but Karmakanic really doesn´t sound like them. It´s probably the fans of The Flower Kings that will get most out of Entering the Spectra even though people unfamiliar with said band should be able to enjoy the music as well.

The musicianship is outstanding. Anyone familiar with The Flower Kings knows that this band consist solely of astonishing musicians. Jonas Reingold obviously gets to play a few beautiful and challenging bassparts here and there but the music is mainly band oriented and not a showcase for Jonas Reingold´s bass skills.

The production is a high quality product which has many of the unmistakebly swedish characteristica.

As a fan of The Flower Kings I bought this album and expected to hear some great music and I must say that some of my expectations were met. This is good music but I can´t say that I enjoy it as much as the music from The Flower Kings. One of the good things about Entering The Spectra is that it sounds like a band effort most of the time and that´s always a good thing in my book when solo artists release albums. Too much bass noodling would have been a bit too trivial IMO. I´ll give Entering the Spectra 3 stars.