Interesting that the regular album will be that short (by their standards). Nice to get some bonus tracks, though.
Okay, but why are you including The Flower King in there? I know some people in certain circles like to think of it as the real first TFK album, but it's not. The style is very much in the TFK vein, but Roine performs all of the guitars, bass and keyboards. It is very much a Stolt solo album. I mean, if we are gonna include The Flower King, then why aren't we including Hydrophonia and Wall Street Voodoo as well?
I know The Flower King is not a proper TFK album, I have the album listed under 'Roine Stolt' on my iTunes. I like to look at that album as like the prequel album to the Flower Kings discography; sort of like The Hobbit is to Lord of the Rings, or something of that sort. (Ive never read LOTR, btw). The album never enters my top 5 on principle, but it is better than at least a couple of proper Flower Kings albums.
I probably agree with all of that, but I still don't call it a real TFK album. No Tomas Bodin, no Flower Kings!
Well considering that most of the material (for TFK albums) is WRITTEN by Roine Stolt, especially in the first few albums, they're more like solo albums featuring other members, many of which were ON his solo album
The Flower King, and they've played many tunes from it as a band, The Flower Kings, much in the same way that Porcupine Tree has done "Radioactive Toy" as a full band, even though it was completely done by Steven Wilson himself.
Whether or not you like Tomas' playing I think is a bit irrelevant when considering
The Flower King as a TFK album. It's like saying Spock's Beard's
The Light wasn't a real SB album because it didn't have Ryo Okumoto on it. I know, you'll probably say "That's a different story", but Ryo does add a lot to the band's sound, and even some fans here might agree that SB sounded better after
The Light. And back to PT, the addition of Richard Barbieri into the "band" really added a lot to their sound, especially when
The Sky Moves Sideways came around.
Either way, I count
The Flower King as a pre-TFK album, a sort of proto-type, and even though Tomas was not on it, Roine does a pretty good job with his keyboards. I'm sure we won't ever know, but it's also quite possible that, for the songs Roine wrote in the earlier TFK albums, Roine wrote all the keyboard parts and gave Tomas the demo and said "Play these parts with your keyboards", which in effect would mean that Tomas was really only a session player, recording things that Roine wrote.
Not to diminish anything Tomas does, and I'm sure he does add a lot to Roine's music once they're in the studio, but the writing credits all (usually) say "Music by Roine Stolt", a lot more often than not. So if that is the case, then I would definitely count
The Flower King as a TFK album, while an album like
Hydrophonia would not, mainly because it is an instrumental album. Most of TFK release an instrumental live album once and even went out of their way to call it an album by "Circus Brimstone", rather than "The Flower Kings".
-Marc.