WAITING FOR MIRACLES

There's probably an interesting book - or at least a big long Prog Magazine article - to be written at some point in the future telling the hidden inner story of the Flower Kings. After their early run of albums took on such a joyous and sunny disposition, a bit of incongruous darkness seemed to creep in here and there, after their late 2000s hiatus they came back with a couple of albums in the early 2010s of which the latter, Desolation Rose, seemed outright grim. Then there was the weirdness around "Roine Stolt's The Flower King", a project through which Stolt put out Manifesto of an Alchemist, an album undeniably in a Flower Kings style but which had the absence of Tomas Bodin hanging over it.

In 2019 we got a new Flower Kings album proper - never mind the debates about what Manifesto of an Alchemist counts as, this one's got the name on and everything - and no Tomas Bodin. Whatever the reasons for this, the band don't seem to be letting it get them down - quite the opposite, in fact. This is the most effortlessly optimistic and happy-sounding album the group have released for quite some time, and a capable blending of numerous sonic styles. At points it seems like they are borrowing a lot from classic bands like Genesis, then things shift and they seem to be playing in a mode not unlike fellow 1990s prog revivalists like Spock's Beard, and then things will shift again and you'll hear them indulging in fairly cutting-edge electronic stuff which could open for Ozric Tentacles.

All of this would be incoherent without sufficient care given to the connecting tissue and the overall compositional structures, and the band seem to have that down pat here. Clearly, the departure of Bodin, who'd been part of the Kings ever since Back In the World of Adventures, has not slowed them down at all, and whilst he of course made valuable and important contributions to their prior work, new keyboard maestro Zach Kamins does a fine job as well.

Whilst the 2012-2013 reactivation of the group seems to have been a brief flash in the pan, this time the end of the hiatus seems to have stuck, with no less than three additional studio albums (at the time of writing) emerging after this. I can well understand why - the compositions are tighter, the emotional tenor of the music is better communicated than it has been for a long time, the quality control has improved, and in general I'd say this is the best album they've put out since The Rainmaker.