THE FLOWER KING

Roine Stolt's The Flower King was, of course, the project that brought together the Flower Kings, and it's kind of the blueprint for every subsequent Flower Kings project - particularly when it comes to lyrics which depending on your mood might come across as hippy-dippy preachy nonsense or sunny and optimistic, retro-prog excess with a focus on long-form compositions, and the various other gimmicks which the Flower Kings have kept coming back to.

In other words, if you find that the Flower Kings are not usually to your tastes, there's nothing here to prompt you to change your mind - though over time, I've found the album has grown on me. Though The Flower Kings would go on to spearhead the retro-prog movement, there's a wider range of musical influences at work here than I had previously given credit for; on the title track there's moments where a gospel-ish chorus gives way into a raw, bluesy-funky jam for instance, which is the sort of thing most bands trying to just riff on the prog of the past would not have bothered with.

Whilst much has been made of Stolt's future Transatlantic bandmate Neal Morse and his career left-turn into combining progressive rock with explicitly Christian themes, people don't talk so much about Stolt producing overtly Christian-themed prog at least as early as this album. If prog was a dirty word in the early 1990s, "Christian rock" was even more sneered at, and still is, and with some justification - there's masses of third-rate artists out there who are fobbing off vapid, substandard work on the paying public under the guise of "Christian" music because they know there's an instant market that'll latch onto their work.

That said, this certainly doesn't seem to be the case here: The Flower King is a solid progressive rock album which refuses to compromise on the virtuosity and the progginess of the material, but also sees no reason to flinch back from Stolt's personal expressions of faith in the lyrics. There might be some hippy-ish moments here and there, but that's certainly preferable to some of the more dourly disapproving religious material out there, and the lyrics express an endearingly welcoming and non-exclusionary vision which is here to share joy, not to offer disapproval. Even if the lyrics do nothing for you, the soaringly emotional music can't help but be uplifting, and as such when you want to listen to something which is resoundingly upbeat it hits just the spot. On the strength of this, I'm certainly inclined to give the Flower Kings another chance, since I think I may have given them short shrift in the past.