The Flower Kings - Instant Delivery
Performance
Production
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The Flower Kings - Instant Delivery
Performance
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Sweden's neo-progressive rockers, The Flower Kings, have never really been content with just putting out your standard 50-something-minute album. Four of their nine studio albums, and both of their live albums, have been double-disc behemoths, averaging about 140 minutes in length. Hell, even their single disc releases have all approached double-disc length, eating up almost the entire 80-minute disc capacity every time. Whatever happened to the good old days of the 35-minute long album you used to get from your favorite band, once or twice a year, with little or no filler to have to wade through. Give me that over these bloated, filler-fueled, albums most bands are churning out every two or three years. Every two or three years IF you are lucky. A prolific musical output is not necessarily a bad thing for a band, if they have the songwriting chops to back it up. Just look at what The Beatles did in seven short years. But, if half of the stuff you churn out is forgettable filler, then what is the point. Did we really need Roine Stolt solo albums, 1998's Hydrophonia, and 2005's Wall Street Voodoo (a double-CD, by the way), between Flower Kings' releases? After all, he was already splitting his time between three other bands, Kaipa, Transatlantic, and The Tangent - participating in several studio albums and tours with those bands during his Flower Kings tenure. Maybe his time would have been better spent focusing on making The Flower Kings better, although Transatlantic is still my favorite of the bunch. The Flower Kings' latest album, Paradox Hotel, is another one of these double-CD monstrosities, and it serves as the center point of this new concert DVD. Make that double-DVD. Instant Delivery was recorded on April 19th, 2006 at the 013 Club, Tilburg, The Netherlands, and provides a much more satisfying concert experience than their rather sterile Meet The Flower Kings DVD, of 2003, which essentially featured the band performing live in a theater, with what appeared to be only a few friends in attendance, but with plenty of ridiculous film footage to interrupt most of the performances. This one is a real concert, in front of an always great, prog-rock-loving, Tilburg crowd, and it brilliantly captures the essence of a Flower Kings live show. Nine of the 17 songs performed on this long two-disc set, are from the new Paradox Hotel album. Surprisingly, they are all relatively normal length songs, since they passed on the album's longest epic, the 21-minute "Monsters & Men". I have not heard the Paradox Hotel album in its entirety yet, so this DVD was my introduction to the new material. Based on these performances, this is easily some of the best stuff these guys have done since at least 2000's Space Revolver. The music is a little more accessible than some of their earlier stuff, as they have steered away from most of the jazz fusion elements and excessive "progginess" of their previous albums, in favor of brighter melodies and catchier hooks. I have never been the world's most enthusiastic Flower Kings fan, but this DVD is helping to change that. This performance really highlights just how impressive a bunch of musicians these guys are, and how they are able to elevate their music to the next level on the live stage. I first became a Roine Stolt fan through his work with Transatlantic, and from there I delved into The Flower Kings. Stolt is an amazing guitarist who cleverly blends elements of jazz, rock, blues and pop into his own very distinctive style. His vocals are even more distinctive, and are really what gives The Flower Kings their signature sound. As the primary songwriter of the band however, he often wears himself a little too thin with all of his side projects. I find much of The Flower Kings' music to be repetitive and tedious, but each album always contains just enough flashes of brilliance to keep me hanging on. The video begins with some grainy, backstage, camcorder footage which eventually transitions to the main stage screen, which is displaying colorful images of the cosmos, as a NASA space launch countdown sequence is being played. As the countdown reaches the end, you get a "we have ignition" to signal the start of the show, but instead, everything goes silent except for the sound of a ping pong ball being bounced around, as psychedelic inkblot images are flashed on the screen. Typical Flower Kings quirkiness. The band soon takes the stage and kicks things off with the title track of the new album, which proves to be the most straight ahead rocker of the night. Gone from the band is hired gun, Daniel Gildenlow, from Pain Of Salvation, who had been with them since 2002's Unfold The Future. Joining the band is new drummer Marcus Liliequist, who replaces Zoltan Csörsz. Where Csörsz' dazzling drumming demanded your focus every time he entered the screen, due to a style that was more befitting of some intense jazz fusion band, Liliequist simply holds down the groove, never too flashy, but never missing the beat. No wonder Paradox Hotel sounds so different. Stolt is sporting some hideous, light colored, floral suite, which makes him stick out like a sore thumb on stage, but he is in fine form this night, welcoming the Dutch crowd, in his heavily Swedish-accented English. Now that's odd. Another Paradox Hotel song follows, the catchy "Hit Me With A Hit", which showcases some of the bands killer harmony vocals, and sounds like it could have been a lost track from Yes' 90125 album.. From there, they mix in the occasional classic number such as "In The Eyes Of The World", from 1997's Stardust We Are, and "I Am The Sun", from 2000's Space Revolver. It was cool to hear these two gems, since they were not included on the Meet The Flower Kings DVD. I really enjoyed all of the new Paradox Hotel material. Each song expressed a unique feel and style ranging from the gorgeous piano-ballad, "Jealousy", to the bluesy hard rock of "Life Will Kill You". "What If God Is Alone" features one of the most infectious choruses the band has even produced thanks again to some stunning harmony vocals between Stolt, Hans Froberg, and Jonas Reingold. For the instrumental "Pioneers Of Aviation", Tomas Bodin puts on his best Keith Emerson hat to begin the tune with an incredible flurry of organ and synthesizer riffs, which eventually leads into an extended percussion jam, with Froberg joining Liliequist on his percussion kit. Reingold soon takes over with an impressive fretless bass solo before the song eventually goes into its super jazz/prog fusion main theme. This DVD really gives you that feeling of being there. Even the breaks before each of the two encores were shown in their entirety - the first one simply scanning the excited crowd, and absorbing their wild applause before Tomas Bodin comes back out to greet them with "you are an extraordinary audience." Stolt follows with "that is something we say every night, but tonight we actually mean it" - which I am sure he probably also says every night. They ended this first encore with the Space Revolver power-ballad "A Kings Prayer", which ends with an incredible "Hey Jude" sing-along. The second encore is preceded by time-lapsed footage of the entire stage setup, soundcheck, and tear down, which is superimposed on the screen while the crowd cheers for one last song for about four minutes. When the band returns to the stage again they are greeted with lots of calls for "Stardust We Are", and Stolt grants their wish with, "Your right, Stardust you are, and Stardust you'll get!" At "only" 12 minutes, this was a very abbreviated performance of the original 25-minute epic, and they turned it into a much heavier jam than what I remember. Although there were some minor and major flaws with my DVD package, they did not affect the overall quality of this presentation. To start with, disc one had a major audio synchronization problem, but thankfully the U.S. distributor, Inside Out Music America, acknowledged the problem on their website, and offered a quick replacement copy. I had a new copy in less than a week. The new disc was actually mastered at a slightly higher volume level than disk two, but the sound quality was about equal after you adjusted levels between discs, and the sync problem was fixed. Dolby Digital 5.1 surround, and PCM stereo audio options were provided and they both sounded excellent. Instrument separation was superb, and the surround speakers were used perfectly to create an authentic live environment. The video quality was fairly average. Some of the longer shots were somewhat blurry, and the halo effect was present at times, but the picture was generally clear and the colors were vibrant. Surprisingly, it was only shot in full frame instead of widescreen. There were absolutely no special features included on the discs, but, hell, when I get over two and one-half hours of live concert, I ain't complaining. Just when I was starting to grow a little tired of The Flower Kings, along comes this exceptional DVD to restore my faith in the band. On the strength on their apparently excellent new Paradox Hotel album, I have already placed my order, this performance shows why many consider The Flower Kings to be near the top of the current progressive rock hierarchy. Reviewed by Paul M. Roy - February 2007 |
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Running Time: 164 Minutes |
DVD Release Date - September 2006 |