Flower Kings Appreciation Thread

The Glide wrote: M27Barney wrote: Wonder if there exists (on planet earth) another human being with EXACTLY the same musical taste as myself? Seems fairly unlikely as both our brains would have to have exactly the same connections! an almost impossible coincidence too improbable to imagine really!!! My musical taste is in constant progress, so we might meet somewhere during the transition

Aye - the flux has led us to like CoE's latest - do you like "Raven that refused to sing" - that is another of my current Fave's!!!

Tomas has announced on his facebook page that he is working on a new solo album , his first in 6 years I think.

I asked him if it was going to be I Am/You Are-esque or in the mould of Cinematograaf, he says he will be surrounded by moogs and reckons it will be Cinematograaf-ish.  Sounds interesting.  I quite like Cinematograaf but it's much more atmospheric soundtrack music as opposed to full on prog.  Now if he was to add in a few more sequencer parts, in the style of his solo section on the Banks tour you can colour me very very interested.

I`m having a break from FK new lp. As I`ve overloaded myself with it.

Hey all, thought I'd drop a quick hello.  I just haven't been nearly as into prog lately as I'd been for the past few years, I've been doing a lot of Indie rock as of late, though interestingly enough, I ran into a sixteen minute song by Snow Patrol earlier this evening . . . 

Hmm. Not too sure what a masterpiece is any more. I suppose that it could be a CD - considered by a majority to be in the top 10 of a particular genre - but that is a "consensus" masterpiece. "Personal" masterpiece is another completely different matter!
And is a masterpiece a flawless CD? Even "Selling England by the Pound" has the awful Collins "More Fool Me"...Even on this thread we have those of us who think that "Monsters & Men" is sublime - I love the start, the extended guitar solo is genius and the ending is possibly in the top ten endings of all time....

M27Barney wrote: Hmm. Not too sure what a masterpiece is any more. I suppose that it could be a CD - considered by a majority to be in the top 10 of a particular genre - but that is a "consensus" masterpiece. "Personal" masterpiece is another completely different matter! And is a masterpiece a flawless CD? Even "Selling England by the Pound" has the awful Collins "More Fool Me"...Even on this thread we have those of us who think that "Monsters & Men" is sublime - I love the start, the extended guitar solo is genius and the ending is possibly in the top ten endings of all time....

Yeah, no question that on Progarchives, a "masterpiece" is a totally subjective thing.  When I'm dealing with 70's albums, I will sometimes rate something a masterpiece, even though I might not like a track or two, simply because it is the bands defining work and/or it has had a massive impact on the genre (and even other genres).  With modern albums, I almost never give the 5 star rating, because I think a certain amount of time is required to say that an album is a true masterpiece.....say 5 or 10 years (at least).  Because, let's be honest, there were albums in the early 2000's touted as "masterpieces", that no one talks about anymore and never come up when talking about "genre defining" albums.  On the other hand, I've rated some obscure 90's albums as masterpieces, just because I loved them so much and still do.  So maybe in 10 years I'll rate Banks or DR as masterpieces (though I highly doubt that).  I thought TSoNE was a masterpiece from the second or third listen, and still do.  Stardust We Are was not a masterpiece in my opinion the first year or so I had it, but in retrospect I think it deserves that title, as nearly all FK fans hold it in high esteem.......and even some people who are not huge fans ("filler" tracks aside).  Anyway, I think an album needs to hold up for at least 5 - 10 years before it can really be called a masterpiece.......but that's just my opinion, and I've rated newer stuff with 5 stars anyway (though in a lot of cases I think of those as 4.5 stars......maybe in 5 or 10 years they can have the full 5.........I guess I see a difference between personal masterpieces, those that I just love throughout for whatever reason, and those that withstand the test of time and represent a bands best work by at least a rough consensus).

Isn't it weird that "Dull, Lifeless, boring" and "Sublime, exhilarating, hair-raisingly good" - complete polarisation of our experiences when the sound waves coming out of the headphones, and into our ears - are parsed by our clearly very different - prog appreciation subroutines running in our brains Wonder if we mapped the synapse firing sequence and locus in mine, infandous and Nov unit brains - could be correlated and we could observe empirically the similarities in Nov/M27 sequence and the startling difference in the infandous brain!

I pre-ordered mine and it should be here in a couple of weeks - coz I went for the cheapskate free postage!
You've really sold the TA CD too us all
I am sure that Neal Morse wouldn't really like it if I opened up his thoracic cavity and wrote "Jesus Saves" on his heart with an indelible marker pen !!!

I have been having a rest from the flokis for a bit - because I have a lot of new CD's to assimilate....
I'm not too sure if the new TA is going to be any good looks like TA are now just a Neal Morse backing band!!!

Contrary to the above I do like quite a few off the bonus disc of Desolation Rose.  I won't even bore you all to death again raving about Interstellar Visitations, suffice to say it's my favourite off the whole album.

I'm very much in agreement with the consensus here, Banks and DR are both very good albums and have great moments but great albums they are not, and the same goes for TSONE.  For some strange reason my mp3 player has loaded both discs as one album, a mish-mash of both or should I say one loooooong album.  Being a technophobe I have no idea how to remedy this and I have to say there's quite a few off the bonus disc I really like.

Truth be told I've been really struggling with prog lately, nothing much new has bowled me over for quite a while.  Somewhat worried, over the weekend I thought I'd put things to the test and put on the headphones, lay back and listened to Garden of Dreams as it should be heard, eyes closed, darkened room etc and see how that went down.  No need to worry, those spine tingling moments (which as Nov rightly said appear to be missing off the last few releases) are all over this one, this is a true masterpiece.  Don't think we can expect anything of this quality again I suppose.