The Flower Kings, Chapter 2: Retropolis

2) Retropolis (1996)

...And after all, it's so good to be alive!

It's 1996 and The Flower Kings are beginning to get into their comfort zone. Since The Flower King, Roine has made one album each year in that vein, and this is going to continue for some time. The result will be a mighty streak of albums, all in more or less the same style. Newcomers may find it daunting, naysayers might say that all of them are interchangable. There's a point there, somewhere. From day one, The Flower Kings found a style and stuck with it. If you dislike one TFK album, it's unlikely that another will change your mind.

But all TFK albums are not equal. That's very much the point of this series: to place each album in the context of their entire career and to see how well they hold up against one another. The other point is: to help newcomers, maybe people who have just purchased the Kingdom of Colours box set, navigate through this wealth of symphonic riches. Today's album is highly relevant to both purpouses.

Because Retropolis is easily one of my favourite TFK albums. It is also easily one of the most accessible ones, so if you are a newcomer, this would be an excellent place to start. If The Flower King had better consistency and Back In The World Of Adventures had better tunes, Retropolis has both. The artwork is also downright gorgeous. In terms of line-up, there has been one change. After his absence from Back, Hasse Fröberg is now permanently part of the band and will increasingly be the focal point of their live shows. Although he has only one lead vocal part on the album, it will turn out to be quite a show-stealing one...

Retropolis starts with the first ever Flower Kings song to be written by someone other than Roine Stolt. "Rhythm of Life"comes courtesy of Tomas Bodin and it's not actually a song. It's more of an absurdist joke. It's the sound of two people playing ping pong, while a voice goes “rhythm of life” over it. The joke being that the ping pong sounds aren't rhythmic at all, I guess. Yeah, I don't know either. It is typical Bodin in the sense that he often uses all kinds of samples and sound effects to humorous effect. There's more examples of that to come.

Anyway, the joke lasts shorter than it took for you to read all that, and then the album proper starts. And, boy, what a start. “Retropolis”, the title song, is everything. It's the bee's knees. It's absolutely exhilarating. The almost classical-sounding opening, that kick-ass bass line in 9/4, the way it builds and builds, then breaks down and builds and builds again until an oriental-sounding theme brings it all to a climax, the little electronic beat in the middle, even the acoustic ending: every aspect of this is brilliant. “Rhythm of Life” notwithstanding, it remains the first and only instrumental album opener for The Flower Kings. Roine don't need no stinkin' vocals to grab the listener by the balls!

A little further ahead on the album, there is another beloved TFK classic: “There Is More To This World”. Its opening an in-your-face synth bomb, its verses optimistic and its chorus an all-out singalong, this is another one of those shamelessly indulgent hippie prog tracks that must have felt like a warm bath to starved progheads in the nineties. It's still a warm bath now. Of course, what really makes this song is the second half, where Hasse Fröberg takes over the vocals in a starmaking turn. The section starts off as a gentle acoustic ballad, where the chorus from the first half is intelligently recontectualized around different chords. This section builds and builds and Fröberg's amazing vocal range is used to its fullest, until a big crescendo brings it all to a rousing close. Brilliant song.

Random Google result for "Retropolis".

In between those two show-stoppers, we also get a ballad, “Rhythm of the Sea”. It starts off very soundscapey, but quickly reveals itself to be a dramatic and emotional track about, allegedly, a foiled suicide attempt. This particular subject is a bit of a trigger for me, so I tend to skip this song for reasons completely unrelated to the song's actual quality. Roine's voice is heavily coated in effects; I must admit I prefer the more intimate-sounding remaster on the The Road Back Home compilation. The guitars soar to the stratosphere.

“Romancing the City” is, again, written by Bodin. Again, it's a very short little ditty. Not a full song, but a sort of interlude to set a different mood. There's a few of these Bodin-penned interludes on this album (and the next album is going to go absolutely hog-wild with them). Later on, Bodin will start contributing more actual songs to the band, but right now, his main contributions lie in these interludes. You could call them filler, or you could say they spice things up and keep things varied. I will call them “Bodinterludes” from now on. “Romancing the City” is a little bit of piano that is fun while it lasts.

“The Melting Pot”, however, is filler. Pure and simple. It's a saxophone-led instrumental variation on the arabesque theme from “Retropolis”. It's a nice melody, Stolt gets a nice bit of guitar in, there's a nice church organ solo in the middle, it's a nice song. But I can't deny it's filler.

There's no more missteps on the album: everything that follows is 100% legit. “Silent Sorrow” is another awesome one, a more humorous track in which the band get their Zappa on. There's marimbas, unexpected, comical musical twists and “cuckoo” sound effects, but also a kickass guitar solo. Vocally, too, Stolt is on top of his game.

The bells start ringing, preparing us for something darker... “The Judas Kiss” is a dark, dramatic and pleasantly bombastic piece. It starts off cinematic and hard-rocking, but it also features one of the band's more effective jazz jam sessions, before reprising the beginning of “Retropolis”. “Retropolis By Night”, on the other hand, doesn't reprise the title song at all: it is an atmospheric Bodinterlude based around an “On The Run”-type synth beat.

Google has no taste.

“Flora Majora” is the next instrumental, and, although it took me a while, I've grown quite fond of it. Its main theme is incredibly jolly and upbeat, but the song once again has a lot going on. It has to be said that The Flower Kings are masters of uncommon time signatures. So many bands sound so much less confident when they play in anything but regular old 4/4 time; this song is in 5/4 and there's nothing stilted or unnatural about it. The ending sounds like a reprise of, of all things, “Scanning The Greenhouse” of off The Flower King.

“The Road Back Home” is our quitessential album closer; a melancholy ballad with a proggy instrumental middle-eight and a grand, bombastic, majestic finale. Vintage Flower Kings. Not “Big Puzzle”, perhaps, but a worthy closer nonetheless.

Retropolis is one of the bands most consistent efforts. While it doesn't have any epics (this is the only TFK album that doesn't have anything over 11 minutes), the “major” songs are consistently great while the “minor” songs are consistently entertaining, and it's all very evenly spaced. It has a great flow. The album makes one or two false moves but it's still a step forward compared to The Flower King and Back In The World Of Adventures, both of which are no slouches but had far more imperfections. It's exciting, it's rewarding and it's pretty much endlessly listenable. Now, more than twenty years later, it sounds as fresh as ever. For me, Retropolis is the best album The Flower Kings made during the nineties, although the next one may give it some steep competition...

RATING: A pen, a pineapple, an apple and a pen out of the country of Kyrgyzstan

In my system, that counts as very good.

CHURCH ORGAN COUNT: Plenty, plenty. In the opening to “Retropolis”, in both the opening and finale to “The Judas Kiss” and very prominently in “The Melting Pot”.

BETTER 50 MINUTE VERSION:
Retropolis
There Is More To This World
Silent Sorrow
The Judas Kiss
Flora Majora
The Road Back Home

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