The Flower Kings, Chapter 6: The Rainmaker

6) The Rainmaker (2001)

The world is a cruel affair if you don't dance to the common beat...

Space Revolver came out in 2000, Unfold the Future two years later. These are my two favourite TFK albums, and The Rainmaker came out right in between. In theory, The Flower Kings were on top of their game.

Sure enough, The Rainmaker has its fans – every album is somebody's favourite! However, The Rainmaker is often considered one of the bands lesser offerings, by fans and reviewers alike. Of course, I'd love to be the guy to tell you that all this negativity is wrong and that The Rainmaker is an unfairly maligned masterpiece, but we'll have to see if that's true.

It's no wonder this album turned out to be such a hot potato, because 2001 saw the band in transition. While Jonas Reingold, a headstrong and demanding musician, was still finding his footing within the band, drummer Jaime Salazar was on his way out. Plagued by personal drama, Tomas Bodin was down for the count and couldn't contribute any new material. It was up to Roine Stolt, with help from the always-game Hasse Fröberg, to single-handedly keep this fragile ship afloat. For the first time since Back in the World of Adventures (and also for the very last time), the whole album has been written by Roine Stolt. No Bodinterludes or Fröballads here. For better or worse, the responsibility is fully on Roine.

But Roine was and remains an almost supernaturally busy man. Not only did he continue the relentless one-album-per-year schedule with The Flower Kings, plus associated touring, he had also joined a little group called Transatlantic, which also toured Europe and North America around this time. Given all this, it's a bit of a miracle that The Rainmaker got made in the first place, and that it didn't break the band up.

Ultimately, though, the circumstances surrounding the creation of an album are fleeting, while the album itself is what remains. So how does it hold up now that we're all seventeen years older?

“Last Minute on Earth” opens with a spot of Mongolian throat singing, which I'm sure we all agree is something we always wanted to hear from The Flower Kings. The song proper kicks in soon after, and kick it does, with its brutal, huge rock riff. The song has a great vocal melody from mr. Fröberg and, like any good TFK prog extravaganza, moves into a lot of different crazy directions before coming back to the main theme. This is vintage Flower Kings stuff, a bit harder-edged than usual, and a great addition to the live repertoire as well. Whatever may be wrong with the rest of the album, at least that's one great song in the pocket.

As usual, the second song brings things down a bit. “World Without a Heart” is an acoustic ballad with honest, intimate lyrics and beautiful vocal harmonies. The song seems to be Roine's personal account of the sorry state his band is in, but it's a hopeful song all the same. It's one of the band's better songs of this sort. Also as usual, it's squeezed in between to big prog pieces.

“Road to Sanctuary” is, at about thirteen minutes, the album's longest. It is the most traditionally proggy song on the album, and the one that sounds the most like the band that made Space Revolver. Needless to say, I like it a lot. Fröberg's verses have a cool blues vibe to them, while the instrumental break is full of the kind of crazy dynamics that made the previous album such a delight. The sound of a vibraphone immediately brings Zappa to mind. There's also a great acoustic section in the middle and Reingold gets to work his bass the way only he can.

That's three songs gone, a good half an hour of music, and I'm still on board at this point. Everything has been fine so far.

But it's at track four where The Rainmaker abruptly jumps the shark. The title track, no less. It's another Flower Kings bolero, something they've done elsewhere. Remember Ravel's bolero? How it starts quitely and builds towards a climax in constant crescendo? Yeah. “The Rainmaker” is not like that. It just plods along with no dynamics and barely any melodic quality to speak of. You'd expect some kind of song to kick in any moment, but it just doesn't happen. And at six minutes long, it skeeters dangerously close to the “waste of time” category.

The album doesn't really fully recover. “City of Angels” is a very different kind of song for The Flower Kings, one that mixes the usual bombastic prog with a smooth, light, sort of soul-type ballad. It's an interesting experiment, but it doesn't really work for me. Tomas Bodin usually tends to choose his sounds well but the screechy, pulsating keyboards on this track are grating (EDIT: Turns out, it was Roine playing keyboards on this album all along. Tomas was an innocent bystander). The song gets really long and slow towards the end, and the “hook” doesn't return. Reingold's brief, emotional bass solo is the best thing about this track.

When people say The Rainmaker sucks, “Elaine” is often brought up as exhibit A. Well, I for one completely disagree. I have a soft spot for “Elaine”. How can you not love a song that goes “Here she comes again / Smiling like a horse / God, he was asleep / On the day she was born”? There's a bit of hypocrisy going on in the lyrics. “People are cruel, Elaine”, dixit Roine. I'll say, you just called her a horse! Roine gently mocks the girl, but also expresses sympathy for the misfists of this world. Bless them. I know plenty of Elaines.

“Thru The Walls” is another much-maligned song, but in this case, yeah, I totally get it. It is just one of those songs that you forget the moment you've heard it. I cant even tell you what the song is like, I've forgotten it. For Roine, this is C-list material. At least the Mongolian throat singer returns at the end. I approve of the Mongolian throat singer.

Steppe up to the plate!

It is up to the heavy rocker “Sword of God” to drag the album back to its feet. I generally like the heavier side of The Flower Kings, and Hasse Fröberg's blues-rock wail is perfect for this kind of stuff. Unfortunately, Roine's writing is letting the side down once again. The melody line seems to lose the plot halway into the chorus, and the words just don't scan very well, which really hampers what would have been a sing-along foot-stomper otherwise. The instrumental break is pretty good.

Before the finale of the album, we get two short instrumentals that are actually quite nice, though they could (and should)  have been more developed. “Blessing of a Smile” is a short but bombastic symphonic piece that feels like the disembodied ending to a nonexistent epic, while “Red Alert” is a cool odd guitar riff that reprises the theme from “Road to Sanctuary”. Too bad it only lasts a minute. These are undeveloped ideas that might have been interesting songs.

“Serious Dreamers” is the nine-minute closer. It's a step up from everything else we've heard since “Road to Sanctuary”, a very Yes-esque piece with more emphasis on multilayered vocals than instrumental shenanigans. It sounds very light, very trebly. There isn't much "body" to the bass range. The song is just on the good side of mediocre. No masterpiece but it'll do. Roine didn't even bother to give it a proper ending like he usually does; the thing just fades out.

Thus ends The Rainmaker, and it is time to say goodbye to an old friend: Jaime Salazar. This is the last Flower Kings album for the man from Santiago, who remains The Flower King's longest serving drummer to date. He's an interesting guy, who also had a brief stint in The Tangent as well as in several Scandinavian heavy metal bands - often in the company of Jonas Reingold. While he isn't a flashy technical drummer like some of his sucessors, his style fitted the band very well. He is a master of giving each song excatly the right feel. He can look back with pride on his impressive body of work with the band.

So what's up with this album? For one thing, it's overlong and all its good ideas are frontloaded. It has a great first thirty minutes, then it runs rather dramatically out of steam. It seems this is where Roine's relentless work ethic finally cought up with him. In just two years, 2000 and 2001, the world saw the release of two Flower Kings and two Transatlantic albums, plus international tours for all of them, and The Flower Kings were keeping pretty strictly to their one-album-a-year schedule even before that. Something had to give eventually. It seems Roine kept on making Flower Kings records even though he was (temporarily) out of good music to put on them.

As much as I'd love to tell you The Rainmaker is an underrated masterpiece, I can't say that it is. Still, it's not something that should be overlooked either, if only for that fantastic opening song. Let's not forget, The Rainmaker isn't actually bad. It's just outclassed. And if there's any album that outclasses it, it's got to be the next one.

RATING: Three Tears out of a Mongolian hat

CHURCH ORGAN COUNT: Integrated into Sword of God. It's always the biblical ones.

BETTER 50 MINUTE VERSION:
Last Minute on Earth
World Without A Heart
Road To Sanctuary
Sword of God
Blessing of a Smile
Red Alert
Serious Dreamers

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