Prog rock as widescreen cinema — celluloid dreams in twelve acts.
Progressive rock has always been a filmmaker’s genre with its towering structures, shifting time signatures, and instrumental textures ripe for imagined landscapes and unfolding stories. On their seventeenth studio outing, LOVE, Swedish prog icons The Flower Kings, embrace that visual lineage with sweeping intent. The twelve-song project is a panoramic storyboard, an epic in twelve tableaux, evoking the grandeur of Kubrick, the mysticism of Tarkovsky, and the neo-psychedelic surrealism of Jodorowsky. Roine Stolt and company have created music that plays like cinema for the mind as each song a scene, each motif a camera movement.
The overture, “We Claim the Moon,” unfolds like a speculative space opera. The track opens with soft vocals, pads, and guitar before a driving riff that shimmers. The layers build like a starfield at dusk before swelling into a bold orchestral rock feel. The song’s upward trajectory feels like a launch sequence; by the three-minute mark, we’re in orbit when the vocals enter.
“The Elder” is a three-act structure, recalling the pacing of a dramatic epic: a gentle opening theme (pastoral flute, 12-string guitar, full synths), a mid-section picks up the energy time shifts, and a flowing guitar solo. The triumphant finale is built with layers of instrumental parts. The lyrics call to mind a hermetic figure, part Merlin, part Gandalf, dispensing wisdom amid temporal collapse. DeMaio’s drumming in the middle third acts as a montage: rapid cuts, tension-building, then resolution.
A ballad framed like a slow-motion flashback scene, “How Can You Leave Us Now!?” flows with lyrical bass and piano. The rich vocal harmonies and gentle Mellotron flutes conjure a melancholic montage, the protagonist in twilight, flipping through memory. Stolt’s guitar tone here is lyrical and reverberant, like a tracking shot through emotional wreckage. Hasse Fröberg’s vocal phrasing adds to the air of the song along with Stolt’s.
“Burning Both Edges” isthe album’s action sequence. Exotic guitar lines, melodic bass lines, and agile keyboard runs manifest the setting around the textured vocals. The bridge introduces a warm synth solo. The ending building before collapsing into a final sustained note. The ensemble’s precise execution creates the feeling of a camera tracking complex stunts in real-time.
“The Rubble” has colorful tonal centers and effective feel changes that give this song a prog-rock glaze. The rhythm section moves with grace as warmly distorted guitar melodies, keyboard figures, and vocals float in and out. “The Phoenix” is a cinematic ascent. Starting in embers (soft tones and vocals), the track gradually introduces layered guitars, full keyboards, and shimmering drums until it bursts into a fine guitar solo of flight. Imagine a slow pan upward from ground to sky. The melody is hopeful without being naïve.
“Love Is” features fresh instrumental sounds and layered vocals. Musically, it merges with guitar melodies that swells with cinematic harmonic intervals that feel like they dissolve from one emotional scene to the next. This track serve as an overture to the whole album in reverse, with the two vocalists themes swirling through the instrumental textures and feel changes.
“Walls of Shame” builds with keyboard, piano, and guitars before settling into a relaxed medium rock beat. The middle section breaks like a newsreel unraveling in flames with a meaningful key change. The epilogue, “Considerations,” continues to evolve the expressive guitar and keyboard textures, building solos, and delicate phrasing frame this prog-rock story. It closes not with finality, but with openness, like the last frame of a film fading to white.
With LOVE, The Flower Kings have crafted a visually evocative prog-rock record. Its sonic design, narrative arcs, and instrumental clarity make it a director’s dream for music that moves the ears and choreographs the imagination. For listeners who “see” their music as much as they hear it, this album is a sensory storyboard: progressive rock as progressive cinema.
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