Album of the Day

Flower Power, by The Flower Kings (2006): Just before I turned the corner into multi-disc albums, I said that, for the most part, albums that fill up the entirety of a CD these days are over padded and just too damn long. That goes doubly true when The Flower Kings are involved. This is one of four studio albums of theirs that fill out two CDs. Honestly, nobody needs 2 hours and 20 minutes of The Flower Kings in one sitting. There's a lot of interesting stuff going on here and there, but it's so spaced out that it gets lost in the mass of ordinariness. Even if you want to keep all of "Garden of Dreams," the hour-long epic that spans the first disc (which then still has an 8-minute instrument tacked on the end), intact, you could cut whole chucks away and still have lots left. I mean, really, any album with "Magic Pie" on it is way too long!