The Flower Kings, Chapter 0: The Flower King

0) The Flower King (1994)

Falling out of the sky, falling into a dream...

So here's album number zero, a disk called The Flower King by an artist called Roine Stolt. It was written and recorded mostly in 1993 and saw the light of day in 1994.

Do not be fooled by the fact that this album does not bear the “Flower Kings” (plural) stamp. Do not be fooled by the absence many of the players we associate with The Flower Kings today (notably Tomas Bodin and Jonas Reingold, the latter of whom wouldn't join the band until 1999). It looks, walks and quacks like a duck. This is already very much a Flower Kings album, in every sense of the word.

Pretty solid one, too. Nearly all elements you would expect from TFK are already present on this proto-album. Some bands start their careers as rookies and grow and mature as time goes by. The Flower Kings, much like their American counterparts Spock's Beard, arrived on this world pretty much fully formed and ready to go. Undoubtedly, this has to do with Roine Stolt already being a veteran on the scene even in 1994.

The personnel list for this album is rather confusing. In addition to names that are familiar to most TFK fans, like Hasse Fröberg, Ulf Wallander and Jaime Salazar, we apparently have one Don Azzaro on bass duties and a certain Dexter Frank jr on keys and production. These two also have production credits on other TFK-related material, but no-one has ever seen them. There's a simple explanation for this: They don't exist. It's just Roine himself doing all that. Roine has a penchant for giving himself strange pseudonyms (see also his Wall Street Voodoo album and Tomas Bodin's Swedish Family project). Why he won't just credit himself, I have no idea. I guess he doesn't want to look like too much of a control freak.

Our dashing young protagonist

So let's dive in with the opening title track. If you need an introduction to what Roine and his fellows are all about, you could probably do worse than "The Flower King", a ten-minute anthemic celebration of the flowery and progressive seventies. Its happy-go-lucky attitude and jolly singalong chorus (the only vocal spot for the inimitable Hasse Fröberg, whose role in the band would expand with every album) is miles away from what some people expect from prog, especially at the time, i. e. Very Serious Music. Sure, there's an obligatory guitar-driven extended instrumental workout, but the mood remains breezy throughout. This lightness of touch is one of the main things that sets TFK apart from the prog rock crowd, and it's probably your number one reason to either love or hate them.

Things get even better when the second track arrives. “Dissonata” is another archetypal ten-minute Flower Kings song, this time with a more rocking edge to it, with its brisk 5/8 pace, crunchy riffs, “darker” lyrics and, indeed, dissonant tones. It's still largely built around verses and choruses, but there's more unexpected stuff happening in the instrumental break. The way its musical themes are inter-weaved is quite, quite brilliant. It's unquestionably my favourite song on the album, a true underrated prog classic.

"The Magic Circus of Zeb" sounds just like that: a circus. It's far from the only Flower Kings song to invoke the romanticism of the old-fashioned travelling circus. It seems our boy Roine has a bit of a fascination with circuses and clowns. Proper, non-ironic clowns, funny and tragic, hailing from a time before their image was hijacked by serial killers and horror film makers.

Not like this.

The track itself is one of the many, many instrumentals that adorn all Flower Kings albums, especially the earlier ones. Things start out promisingly enough, with a swinging beat and a chipper, catchy clown theme that has a pleasant, almost cute naïveté about it, another TFK trademark. It doesn't last though. For its second half, it turns into a much slower and stretched out section with a guitar solo that is highly reminiscent of old Kaipa. I'm not sure if these two halves gel together all that well, but it's a perfect showpiece for Roine-the-guitarist.

"Close Your Eyes" is a short vocal ditty that serves as an interlude between the instrumental set pieces that dominate the middle of the album. I'm not crazy about it but it serves its purpose well.

"The Pilgrims Inn" is another instrumental, in which Roine evokes the ghost (and the geese) of Anthony Phillips and early Genesis. It also directly references Kaipa's “Inget Nytt Under Solen”. It's a pastoral, folksy, almost medieval tune that has an English vibe to it. It demonstrates once more Roine's greatest quality: an incredible ear for simple yet instantly memorable melodies that are richly sown across all of his work. We are also treated to the first appearance of Ulf Wallander, Roine's go-to saxophone guy. At nine minutes, the song is maybe a tad too long.

Music to fight Bowser to

Another instrumental follows. You'd think the album would jump the shark after so many instrumentals, but this one is a real corker. "The Sounds of Violence" is a pleasantly insane Deep Purple-inspired progstravaganza that reminds me, in the best possible way, of the music to a boss battle in a video game. Thrilling stuff.

It's epic time. The album has already gone on for nearly an hour when we're treated to the proto-version of that greatest of TFK-hallmarks: the 20+ minute song. "Humanizzimo" certainly ticks all the boxes you'd expect from a good prog epic, with many moods, rhythm changes, interwoven themes and a clear line running through. Things start off slow and mysterious, with another one of Roine's immediately memorable melodies played on both mellotron and saxophone. Then, basically out of left field (another TFK(tm) hallmark!) there's a quick rhythm change and a crazy, chaotic section – a speciality for Mr. Hasse Bruniusson. Surprisingly, it's Bruniusson who is playing drums all the way through this track; on later albums, his role would be reduced to "weirding it up" on assorted percussion. "Humanizzimo" moves through its six different sections with grace, with the "Only Human" section a clear highlight, as well as the grand finale which kicks off The Flower Kings' long-standing love affair with church organs. Just because Yes used it that one time, every TFK album features church organs in some capacity, and it's glorious. The finale also has Roine singing higher and more emotionally than he's ever done before or since. Neat.

Still, in the pantheon of TFK epics, I'd rate "Humanizzimo" fairly low (well below the likes of "The Truth Will Set You Free" and "Stardust We Are"). Compared to those monumental tracks, "Humanizzimo" is just kind of vanilla. Like he does on the entire album, Roine merely sets up the framework that The Flower Kings will expand upon later. It's still a great prog rock song in its own right.

Lesser gods would end the album on the epic, but Roine can't help but throw one more track in there. "Scanning the Greenhouse" is a reprise for the several themes that we've heard throughout the album, reminding us once more just how memorable those tunes were. One more round of the "The Flower King" chorus brings this album to an immensely satisfying conclusion. Having the end of the album form bookends with the beginning is another tried and trusted TFK trademark that they would repeat many times again, to great effect.

By today's standards, Roine Stolt's The Flower King is an archetypical retro prog rock album. Other artists, as well as The Flower Kings themselves, have since greatly expanded upon everything that's on offer here. But, lest we forget, 1994 was a very different time for progressive music. Basically nothing like this existed at the time. Even the card-carrying progressive acts of the second generation, like Marillion and IQ, were trying to move away from the old “codpieces and capes” lexicon of the seventies. Roine Stolt, on the other hand (as well as his countrymen of Änglagård and the aforementioned Spock's Beard) fully embraced it. We owe him a great deal for it. No-one, least of all Roine Stolt, could predict at the time that this obscure album by a has-been guitarist celebrating a dead-horse genre would be the starting point to an illustrious, successful and highly productive musical career and, indeed, one of the starting points of the famous prog revival of the 2000's.

In 1994 and 1995, Roine played a handful of gigs with this material with a band branded as “The Flower Kings featuring Roine Stolt”. The band also played some old Kaipa tunes, as well as some new material. Its first line-up consisted of Roine on guitar and vocals, his brother Michael on bass, Jaime Salazar on drums, Hasse Bruniusson on assorted percussion and miscellaneous mischief, and one eccentric, temperamental fellow named Tomas Bodin on keyboards, with whom Stolt had colaborrated before in the eighties. We'll be hearing more from him, I'm sure.

So, what now? I suppose I'll have to rate every one of these. But how does one rate a Flower Kings (or, in this case, Roine Stolt) album? They are all basically great, but not perfect. Well, I'm going to try anyway, using a holistic and highly scientific rating system based on Euclidean and Cartesian mathematics, Anglo-Saxon empiricist philosophy and the cosmic energies of holy avocado meditation.
RATING: Four Clowns out of Six Bananas and a Bologna Sandwich

Makes sense

In addition, I will make it my mission to keep track of every time a church organ is heard on every Flower Kings album. Someone has to do this. This is important work, people.
CHURCH ORGAN COUNT: Once, in the finale to “Humanizzimo”.

My daily commute to Amsterdam is usually too short to play a full TFK album. Also, it is my firm belief that inside every bloated, overstuffed 80-minute TFK album, there is a leaner 50-minute TFK album trying to get out. For every album I review, I will make a playlist that cuts away all the excess fat and leaves you with a better* 50-minute version that is more focused and to-the-point, and probably healthier for the waistline.
*”Better” is subjective, of course. I like all TFK albums just fine the way they are. Take this more as a thought experiment than hard-edged criticism.
BETTER 50 MINUTE VERSION:
1. The Flower King
2. Dissonata
3. The Sounds of Violence
4. Humanizzimo
5. Scanning The Greenhouse

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