The Flower Kings
The Sum Of No Evil

Excluding their first three records, the Flower Kings have never really blown me away; their style is too repetitive, with every single note feeling "already known" thanks to that Yes-like manner. To make matters worse, there was an overflow of continuous releases, double CDs, Promos, endless Live albums, and hours of various videos.

Even worse was the penultimate "Paradox Hotel." They've always had a great live presence, mainly due to the remarkable technical skills of the musicians who, without exception, surrounded Roine Stolt. In the aforementioned "Paradox Hotel" I felt the absence of drummer Zoltan Csórsz quite heavily, he's back here and partly thanks to this, partly due to the choice of a single CD, albeit a very long one, and partly because there are no unnecessary tracks, I must say I quite liked this work. All the typical ingredients of the genre are here: the suite, the tempo and atmosphere changes, the instrumental runs, the symphonic openings, the watercolor moments... etc. etc...

It's true, here too everything has already been heard, but what can you expect by now? Yes, in abundance. More Yes than ever, even in the second track "Flight 999 (Brimstone Air)" there is an incredible reprise of the central part of the fabulous "The Gates Of Delirium" taken from the masterpiece "Relayer." I didn't mind at all, in its instrumental parts, the third track "The Sum Of No Reason" which even reminded me of Frank Zappa! Less focused were the vocal parts, mostly a bit predictable, not very melodic and sometimes tedious, but still quite a nice piece.

Stolt's guitar solos are there, teetering between all those already done in every prog record, clean scales, well executed, but nothing more. I'd like to see this band perform music written by others, just for a breath of fresh air. As always, well-balanced sounds, respectable scores, and excellent musicians, but there's still a bitter taste thinking that a group with such capability can't deliver a personal work. The album would have been even better by nipping a few minutes here and there, for instance on the rather boring "Trading My Soul."

Well, despite everything, the best F.K. album in quite a few years. And for this, I give it a good score.