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-fuelled, 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.
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