Last time we looked into the Five Decades of Prog was nearly two years ago now, and we had come around again to the 1980s, which means we continue, finally, after a very long pause indeed, with an album from the 1990s. Let’s not go for something obvious though. How about this?
Album title: Stardust We Are
Artist: The Flower Kings
Nationality: Swedish
Year: 1997
Chronology: 3
The Trollheart Factor: 1
Track Listing: In the Eyes of the World/A Room with a View/Just this Once/Church of Your Heart/Poor Mr. Rain’s Ordinary Guitar/The Man Who Walked with Kings/Circus Brimstone/Crying Clown/Compassion/Pipes of Peace/The End of Innocence/Merrygoround/Don of the Universe/A Day at the Mall/Different People/Kingdom of Lies/If 28/Ghost of the Red Cloud/Hotel Nirvana/Stardust We Are
Comments: I know very little about this band, though they are supposed to be quite famous and popular. I enjoyed one album by their lead guitarist Roine Stoit, and I think I may have heard something like
The King Biscuit Hour? Hmm. No. Doesn’t exist. Must have dreamed that one. Anyway, I read that in fact the band were formed to support Stolt on the tour for his solo album I referred to, his third, called, wait for it,
The Flower King, and then took on a life of their own. With Stolt or without him? Let’s see: with. Okay.
On the face of it, this looks pretty daunting. Not only is it a double album, topping out at well over an hour and ten minutes, not only has it ten - count ‘em! Ten! - instrumentals, which in fact makes half the album instrumental, but it also has a closing track running to 25 minutes! This will either be a joy or an ordeal, guess we’ll find out which soon enough. Pretty spacey, ambient opening as “In the Eyes of the World” gets us going then kicks up into a big dramatic and bouncy keyboard run, part of the riff of Genesis’s “Duke’s Travels” in there lads! Powerful percussion, good guitar, there’s a lot crammed into this opening track, though then again it is ten minutes long. And not even close to being the longest on this double album, as already mentioned. Good start though, gets quite catchy as it goes along.
Nice little instrumental (only nine to go!) and we’re into “Just This Once”, a sort of staggered uptempo with again I have to say a very Genesis keyboard arpeggio running through it (“Fountain of Salmacis”? Yeah, “Fountain of Salmacis”) with an ominous dark kind of atmosphere about it. It’s good but I wonder if the album is going to suffer from too many long tracks? I mean, that’s almost eight minutes, then the next one is nine, though “Church of Your Heart” seems like it might be a ballad, and is quite nice. Some lovely introspective guitar work here. Can see lighters waving in the crowd for this at live performances. Nice sort of Church organ (not that surprisingly, given the title) Toccata going on too. The vocal is good but to be fair nothing terribly special. Something that sounds like a Christmas carol in there too. Hmm.
Into the first of four instrumentals, one after the other, with the tender “Poor Mr. Rain’s Ordinary Guitar” followed by “The Man Who Walked with Kings”, with again I feel a very Genesis sound to it, stronger and mostly driven on keys and harder guitar, the third being a carnival opening into a bloody twelve-minute instrumental (!) called “Circus Brimstone”, which gets all kind of dark and doomy and scary pretty quickly. Could be good. And it is, but I really struggle to keep my attention on an instrumental track that runs for so long, and there’s another one coming. I’m not sure this layout is a good idea. Now there’s some sort of backward masking going on, which I personally think is just silly. At least “Crying Clown” is less than a minute long and just a sort of coda to “Circus Brimstone”, bit Waits-y to be honest. “Compassion” then ends the first disc, with an odd kind of Waters-style echoing vocal against a dark ominous beat, and to be honest it’s the first one that’s grabbed my attention since the opener. It’s also not too long, about five minutes with some sort of hidden track - yes, another fu
cking instrumental, you guessed it - near the end.
On to disc two we go, and we’re back with the church organ blasting its way into what is now our sixth instrumental (seventh if you count the hidden track), “Pipes of Peace”, thankfully again a very short one, just over a minute, and then another epic, eight minutes plus of “End of the Innocence” - these guys just do not do short tracks, do they? This one is not bad, got a sort of lounge feel to it in ways, with some jazzy piano and some almost cinematic synth. “Merrygoround” continues the kind of circus theme of the last part of the first disc, and it’s very peppy and upbeat with fine keys and piano, but again I cannot get away from those Genesis comparisons: I just keep hearing riffs from
Duke and
Nursery Cryme everywhere. And another instrumental in “Don of the Universe”, another long one at over seven minutes. I do like it, but damn it’s hard to keep listening to all these instrumentals. And there are three more to go. This one seems to use a Floyd riff off I think
The Wall. Nice usage of what sounds like birdsong, and then sitar is cool.
The next instrumental is very short, just over a minute and basically just some electric piano or organ noodling, leading us into “Different People”, with sounds of traffic and then an upbeat synth line with some acoustic guitar and quite a catchy hook. It’s a bit hippy-dippy but not bad, and then “Kingdom of Lies” is a much rockier effort, with again the
Duke sound very much to the fore. It quickly breaks down into a sort of blues beat though, swaggering along with all but a sense of Bob Seger to it, quite different I must say. “If 28”, the penultimate instrumental (how can I write such a line? But so it is) is a lovely slow stately piano piece with an edge of sombre mourning about it, then “Ghost of the Red Cloud” has more than a touch of reggae about it, it’s decent enough but kind of meh in other ways, before the final instrumental “Hotel Nirvana” takes us to the closer, the epic 25-minute title track.
Now the opening of “Stardust We Are” bears a very close resemblance to “Forever Morning” from Tony Banks’ solo album
A Curious Feeling, which for me just reinforces the idea that this band, or at least their keysman, is influenced by the Genesis legend. Not surprisingly with a track running for a quarter of an hour, it opens on a long instrumental, nearly four minutes before any vocals come in. I read that this has become The Flower Kings’ signature tune, so can only assume it’s seen as a sort of “2112”, “Supper’s Ready” or “Close to the Edge” among their fans. Only in prog, right? I mean, it sounds okay, and given a few more listens I might appreciate it more, but it takes a really special track to keep my interest straight for 25 minutes, and this ain’t it. Genesis knew how to do it. VDGG knew how to do it. Sometimes. Rush knew how to do it. Arena know how to do it. To me, Yes do not know how to do it, nor do IQ or Spock’s Beard, and the Flower Kings definitely do not know how to do it. Attention just wandered till it was finally over. Not that I thought it was bad, but I couldn’t keep concentrating on it.
Track(s) I liked: Church of Your Heart, Poor Mr. Rain’s Ordinary Guitar, Compassion, If 28
Track(s) I didn't like: Nothing I didn’t actively dislike, just a lot that passed me by.
One standout: Not really no.
One rotten apple: Again, not really. This might have been due to the fact that the album failed to really hold my attention.
Overall impression: I think asking anyone other than a fan to sit through a dozen instrumentals, four of them in a row, one of them twelve minutes long, and then hit them right at the end with a 25-minute epic is too much to expect. I was not quite drained, but more frustrated by the end, and certainly relieved. If the album had been shorter, or had less instrumentals, maybe I might have enjoyed it more. Guess we’ll never know, but on the basis of this album I don’t see myself becoming a fan of these guys. Although a 90s album, I think this could be guilty of that accusation that was levelled at many of the larger prog bands at the end of the 70s, that of overblown, complacent self-indulgence, of being more concerned with how long they could make a song than what was in it, and of being bloated and irrelevant.
Stardust We Are? More like
Stardust Me Arse. Sorry.
Rating: 4.9/10
Future Plan: Probably avoid the Flower Kings, or else invest in some weedkiller.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OhRQ-uI_0JU