Consuming the Tangible

It’s been a minute since we checked in on Roine Stolt and The Flower Kings. While later albums have been a bit of a mixed bag, Love was a strong rebound, and Construction Records has slowly been reissuing the albums InsideOut left on the pavement, so I’ve been taking advantage when applicable, starting with Desolation Rose, the band’s 2013 follow-up to their “reunion” album Banks of Eden (still woefully out of print). The album loses the bonus tracks from InsideOut, but at 90 minutes I’m fine with that, and appreciate the remaster Stolt did on an album I’m still figuring out.

It helps that the band at this point is lean and mean — Jonas Reingold and Tomas Bodin still anchoring the low end and arrangements, respectively. Bodin’s presence is especially felt: Desolation Rose is teeming with vintage mellotron and organ. As always, Hasse Fröberg continues reinforcing Stolt with his guitar and vocals, and it all comes together on the massive opening epic “Tower ONE” thanks to a solid emphasis on Stolt’s guitar work and his remaster, which leaves a touch more space and dynamics, giving the arrangements room to flex.

When the music veers heavy, the album does well—I really like the syncopation and riffing on “Sleeping Bones” and the righteous soloing that closes out “White Tuxedos.” Close listens reveal a lot going on in the mix, and even if you couldn’t decipher all the spoken word and film/newsreel snippets, there’s a tone to the album that’s darker and more intense lyrically and thematically. Give me the darker, more rocking numbers like “Dark Fascist Skies” if you want me to perk up, or something completely opposite, like the lilting, lovely “Blood of Eden” allowing Hasse Fröberg’s voice to shine.

I don’t know if it always works. “Silent Masses” falls flat despite a strong Fröberg vocal assist, and drummer Felix Lehrmann is fine if really there to keep things organized. He’d be gone in the next hiatus/shakeup, making way for long-standing drummer Mirko DeMaio to enter the fold with 2019’s Waiting for Miracles, another InsideOut release recently picked up and dusted off by Construction Records, and most likely the next Flower Kings album I’ll cover here.

We’re keeping June relatively short so I can make some room in the office, keeping the old adage from Love and Death in mind: “Regarding love, what can you say? It’s not the quantity of your sexual relations that counts. It’s the quality. On the other hand, if the quantity drops below once every eight months, I would definitely look into it.” And like a lot of Flower Kings releases, there’s so much to dig into I’m still wrestling with a lot of the middle of the record, finding my way to connect to the tracks. Not my favorite, but not the outlier a lot of folks make it out to be. I like it, even if it loses a bit of the magic of the early stuff.