PARADOX HOTEL

Musical taste and preferences are changing with time and so are my reviews for FloKi albums. I happen to like very much their mainly "regressive" or retro kind of style. But after listening to nine studio outputs of this band, four of them being 2 CD sets with tracks made following more or less the same principle I just can say: Mr. Stolt, hold on, it's enough, just relax and take a rest of a couple of years. Maybe this helps to bring a few fresh musical ideas to your mind. I wouldn't say that "Paradox Hotel" is a bad album. Not at all, but it's just another solid mediocre one from them.

The 21-minute epic song "Monsters & Men" is just (overtly) long but not necessarily good for that reason. It sounds at least to parts very constructed, in a way boring though having a couple of nice sections. There's one weak point in their music becoming at least to me more and more obvious that are the heavily Jon Anderson-inspired spiritual lyrics appearing almost hokey for my taste. And referring to the music I've got to say as much as I like the old Yes-Crimson-Genesis stuff I prefer to listen to the originals from that time and don't have a need for a copy of this style over and over again.

I'm not going into detail for every individual song of this album since this has been done already quite excellent in previous reviews. Fans of Retro-Prog will certainly love it and so will any hardcore fan of the band what is well reflected by the high ratings here. But on the other hand there's isn't anything on there which can fascinate someone listening to a broad spectrum of music and always looking for real progressive music (in the literal sense) like me. So I'm almost seduced to give it "For fans/collectors only" - rating but this would raise the question whether most of their records (apart of "Unfold The Future" which was quite experimental) would not deserve that. And since it's really a solid work and at least for the proned listener an enjoyable album I'll give it 3 stars (good, but really not essential).

I'm becoming more and more convinced that for any Prog lover who isn't a TFK-fan in particular it's more than enough to have two studio and one live record from them. I'd like to recommend Space Revolver, Unfold The Future and Meet The Flower Kings, possibly Retropolis for fans of Retro-Prog.

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