The Flower Kings - "Love" : New album

     These are halcyon days for fans of Yes music. As well as the Steve Howe-led "original" version, technically inactive at this precise moment in time but still a going concern, there's former singer Jon Anderson and his Band Geeks, singing as well as he ever has with a group of Yesalikes who are just as capable of carbon copying the old band as they are of capturing the spirit of 70s Yes with their new music. And if those two weren't enough, there's Roine Stolt's The Flower Kings, who have been on a Yes-friendly creative roll since their 2018 relaunch, a handy surrogate for anyone craving the feel of the prog pioneers’ glory days without directly replicating them.

Love (how on earth did Stolt beat his sometime collaborator Anderson to that title?) is the fifth Flower Kings album in less than six years, but it doesn’t sound like the band are running out of ideas. Instead, it's an album of fully realized ambition, and if the music occasionally moors too close to their British forebears (opener We Claim The Moon sounds like the sort of song Yes might have written if Trevors Rabin and Horn had joined Yes in time for Relayer, and the climax of Considerations is a junior version of the climax of Yes's Awaken), there’s enough going on to ensure that the band’s search for transcendence is truly illuminating.

The Elder is typical. It slowly unfurls over its 11-minute length, drifting from one section to the next, Stolt and Hasse Fròberg’s vocals augmented by twinkling, Disney-esque piano from Lalle Larsson. How Can You Leave keeps the mood gently euphoric, guitars lifting the song skyward as the end nears. Burning Both Edges is similarly relaxed, the spooky throat-sung introduction giving way to pastoral synths, a surprisingly soulful chorus and some magical flute. The instrumental World Spinning sounds like it was piped in from 1970 without touching the sides, wobbling Moog to the fore. And the aforementioned Considerations is a true epic, rich in majesty and drama, kicking off in full-throttle celestial mode before gently winding its way towards that climax over the course of 10 minutes via synth flurries, spiralling guitar and a gospel choir.

Of course, the lyrics are frequently pulled from the encyclopedia of new-age poppycock (The Phoenix includes the lines, “In stark white feathers a king is getting ready/Like a lighthouse in his eyes^”), but it's forgivable because it’s all done with such sincerity. And because, at the end of the day, a world in which Roine Stolt and his band of merry men spin their wondrous stories of love and life is much better than one in which they don’t.