Album of Yesterday

Flower Power, by The Flower Kings (1999): One word nobody uses to describe Sweden's leading modern proggers is "restraint." This is a two disc album, which is long enough, but they insist on packing in something in every minute. For instance, an hour of disc one is given over to the "Garden of Dreams" suite. That really should have been enough, but the they squeezed in another 8+ minute jammy tune to finish that disc out. Why not move that tune, "Astral Dog," to disc 2 and prune some of the filler there, say, the horribly (but not intentionally) funny "Magic Pie?" I'm not sure. Stolt and company string together some great musical bits here and there, but they need to learn to edit and work on the lyrics a bit.

Our office manager has the office next to mine and heard a bit of this yesterday while my door was open (it's 70 degrees at 7am and the heat is on - only in a federal building) and described it as "James Bond music." I'm not quite sure what that means, but it's slightly less derogatory than an old girlfriend's definition of most prog as sounding like the Light Parade at Disneyworld.