George Starostin's Reviews

 KING CRIMSON

"I've been here and I've been there and I've been in between"

General Rating: 3

Introduction

ALBUM REVIEWS:

VIDEOS:

APPENDIX: SOLO PROJECTS

Disclaimer: this page is not written by from the point of view of a King Crimson fanatic and is not generally intended for narrow-perspective King Crimson fanatics. If you are deeply offended by criticism, non-worshipping approach to your favourite artist, or opinions that do not match your own, do not read any further. If you are not, please consult the guidelines for sending your comments before doing so.

This page also hosts comments from the following Certified Commentators: Kevin Baker, Rich Bunnell, Richard C. Dickison, Ben Greenstein, Nick Karn, Joel Larsson, John McFerrin, Derrick Stuart.

Introduction

If prog rock ever lied at least a pair of miles away from your interests, you're simply bound to get at least a couple of King Crimson albums (and one of them certainly got to be In The Court Of The Crimson King), just because listening to a King Crimson album is like listening to the very soul of progressive rock. Here was a group that managed to get away with writing totally de-personalized music - music that didn't seem to come from anybody in particular and didn't belong to anyone in particular. If we're speaking of de-personalized music, Pink Floyd is usually the most obvious candidate that comes to mind. But Pink's lack of human identity was totally artificial, caused by Roger Waters' dislike of the musical press more than of anything else. The actual music was always highly personal, especially the later albums. Same goes for most of the Reverends of art and prog rock - Jon and Ian Anderson, Peter Gabriel, Greg Lake, all of these guys were great but, dang it, they were guys, with their own worlds and psychologies.
King Crimson, on the other hand, was a band in the pure sense of the word - despite its 'revolving door' structure. Come to think of it, definitely because of the revolvin' door structure! Robert Fripp was their musical 'director', but he wasn't much of a composer - his only principle seems to have always been that of putting the music before the composer. And this is the only moment that unites all of King Crimson - from the silly, lightweight pre-Crimson Giles, Giles & Fripp and right to their last crazy sonic experimentations of the Nineties. You might accuse King Crimson of pretentiousness, pomposity, complexity for the sake of complexity and everything, but 'self-indulgence' is the only of the standard epithets that sounds somewhat lame when applied to King Crimson music - because it has no 'self'. It's totally abstract, personality-free, soulless, if I might say so. Even Yes didn't go that far. Maybe it has something to do with jazz music as one of the band's strongest influences: I've always thought of middle and late period jazz as highly esoteric, 'restricted' music with little spiritual filler but a lot of undeserved gall, and the same can be really said of King Crimson. However, they're actually better - sometimes, because the band never felt itself as restricted as even the most professional and talented jazz players; King Crimson have changed quite a lot of images throughout their career.
Of course, there's also a bad side to this lack of face: much too often, the band engages in boring 'art for art' sequences, resulting in the fact that, along with some of the greatest rock moments, they are also responsible for some of its most unbearable ones: whereas Fripp always thrived to be at the front line and would soak in any new influences, he was, and still is, always famous for also disregarding the conventional rules of melody to such an extent that quite a solid batch of the band's catalog can only be accessible to real diehards. But at least their tenure is totally unique among prog rockers, and if you can't help hating art rock but would like to be able to cure yourself of your attitude, King Crimson is the best candidate for you. It's unfortunate that the band never really had any big financial success (as far as I know, their debut album is their only serious sell-out); on the other hand, it saved their music from being overplayed and you can't diss them like you diss your Dark Side Of The Moon - that is, the only reason being 'I'm sick to death of it'...
Lineup: this one's gonna be tough, 'cause the 'classic', Seventies' King Crimson rarely made two albums in a row with the same band members. Here I'll just state that King Crimson grew out of the 'triumvirate' of Robert Fripp (guitar, mellotron; the father and musical soul of the band at all times), Michael Giles (drums) and Peter Giles (bass); they joined together in 1967 and released a flop album in late 1968 (I have it and I'm even reviewing it here). After that, Peter Giles quit, replaced by Greg Lake (bass, vocals) and Ian McDonald (sax, keyboards); Peter Sinfield, the most famous lyricist in all the prog world, also became a legitimate member, probably along the pattern of Procol Harum's Keith Reid. And I'll stop right here, because I just wouldn't want to bug you with all the innumerable line-up changes; I'll confine these to the actual album reviews. All you need to know is that there are at least three main King Crimson incarnations: the 'classical-progressive' 1969-1972 King Crimson (although even that one changed beyond recognition), the 'jazz-hard' 1973-1975 King Crimson (a totally different band with a totally different style) and the 'New Wave' King Crimson that originated in 1981 and featured Adrian Belew as one of its main attractions. This last incarnation of King Crimson has recently resurfaced almost intact (in 1994) and still hangs around from time to time; I suppose we'll be hearing more from these guys in centuries to come, not counting, of course, all the innumerable archive releases they keep on issuing.

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ALBUM REVIEWS
IN THE COURT OF THE CRIMSON KING

Year Of Release: 1969
Record rating = 10
Overall rating = 13

The best (and the first) in overproduced, epic prog rock. If you don't have this record, your knowledge is truly feeble.
Best song: 21ST CENTURY SCHIZOID MAN

The trio of Giles, Giles & Fripp (see the review of their only album in the Appendix) happily dissolved after their weird, almost crazy album flopped badly, but this actually led only to the departure of Peter Giles; brother Michael and friend Robert somehow stayed together. Even so, the change of direction was incredible: Cheerful Insanity didn't offer us even a single hint at what they'd become in just about a year. That record was funny, almost hilarious, displayed a typical British-style optimism and was also highly eclectic - I think I've mentioned the immense variety of style. This one is sad, almost tragic, displaying a sort of bitter Medieval pessimism, and is all dominated by sweeping, mastodontic arrangements of a cathartic character. In the whole history of rock music there's never been witnessed such a radical change of direction.
Oh, okay, this is not Giles, Giles & Fripp, really. Three factors contribute to the general sound of the record, all three of them people, all three - new members of the band, now called King Crimson for sure. Ian McDonald brings us the new musical sound of the band - his keyboards, Mellotron, saxes and woodwinds dominate the tunes, bringing them a grandeur previously unheard of. Greg Lake brings us The Voice - being one of the most powerful male singers in rock, he emphasizes that grandeur and makes the theatrical, artificial songs almost come alive. Finally, Peter Sinfield brings us the Lyrics - meaningless, but fascinating half-fairy tale, half-Tolkien-inspired images that fit in with the music one hundred percent. On top of that, add Fripp's manic guitar and Michael Giles' precise and tasteful drumming, the glimpses of which we already witnessed on the previous record, and you get yourself a masterpiece.
In fact, if King Crimson had never recorded anything but the opening track on the album, '21st Century Schizoid Man', they would still earn themselves an eternal place in the pantheon. Written, sung, and played with a staggering level of brilliancy, it is one of the most powerful apocalyptic songs in rock. The lyrics are good, and Lake manages to sing them with enough venom to be convincing; moreover, his voice is encoded by some kind of electronic gadget that makes it all the more scaring (I must add, though, that even the clear, untampered with vocals, as heard in concert on Epitaph, are just as captivating). The main rhythm track, booming and crashing, rivals the Who in volume and power; and the lengthy instrumental passage in the middle (called 'Mirrors') is simply awesome. It borrows a lot of elements from jazz, mostly courtesy of McDonald's Mellotron, but they rock; and Fripp's Hendrix-style soloing also fits the song well. Along with Genesis' 'Dancing With The Moonlit Knight' and a couple Jethro Tull tunes, this is my favourite creation in the whole prog rock genre.
The other tracks don't fall short of the standard, though, because the record manages to contain all of my Top Three King Crimson songs. The beautiful, oh so incredibly beautiful 'Epitaph' beats lots of classical music chef-d'aeuvres for the title of 'The Grandiose Epic', and it features Lake's most stunning vocal delivery on the whole album. Of course, you might also consider it highly theatrical and insincere, but who cares? This was the first true prog rock album in the full sense of the word; are we speaking sincerity when we deal with prog rock albums? Certainly not. So forget that and just let yourself be swept away by this 'storm of emotions'; and the opening guitar notes (are these guitar notes?) are just as moving as Eric Clapton's solo on 'While My Guitar Gently Weeps' (which is a very high compliment, in case you doubt it). Finally, the title track, the most 'pretentious' one on the album, is just as good, this time punctuated by the band's celestial vocal harmonies. Who is the 'crimson king', I wonder, and why does the song activate visions of some kind of underwater fairy kingdom in my mind? Anyway, that's the good thing about Sinfield lyrics: they always mean something different to everybody. Which means they don't mean anything, of course, but that's just a game, isn't it? Yup. The song is fantastic. Finally, we have the ultra-overblown, almost ridiculously so, artsy ballad 'I Talk To The Wind'; its pomposity and almost sickening flatulence used to drive me crazy, but since then I've come to realize that the melody is awesome. I just don't pay much attention to the lyrics. Try to imagine it's a love ballad, for Chrissake, and you'll be able to enjoy it as much as I do.
The only mishit on the album is another ballad, the deceiving 'Moonchild': it starts close in style to 'I Talk To The Wind', but later on is transformed into a dull, avantgarde collage of keyboard noises that seems to drag on forever. Maybe it was inspired by Pink Floyd's experiments on Ummagumma? Even so, these guys, unlike Pink Floyd, never knew where to stop: 'Moonchild' is, funny enough, the longest track on record. To tell you the truth, I should have deprived it of one point for this load of dreary crap. But I won't. Just because the other songs are so darn incredible. No wonder it made the band big stars overnight, and they were never able to top their effort - neither artistically nor commercially. Ah, but that don't matter, really. The record still holds up as one of the most monumental, important and enjoyable creations of prog rock, and this is certainly the only decent place to start with King Crimson. If you don't have this record, you basically... never mind. Just think how much impact the record must have had in 1969. Virtually, it spurred all of the major prog rock bands - ELP, Yes, and Genesis among them - to further and unexplored heights. But few of these further records were able to beat the original.

I talk to the wind or I talk to people? Where are your ideas?

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Rich Bunnell <[email protected]> (05.03.2000)

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EPITAPH

Year Of Release: 1997
Record rating = 8
Overall rating = 11

A good archive release, if a little excessive; still, these live recordings are all inferior to the studio ones.
Best song: 21ST CENTURY SCHIZOID MAN (all three of 'em)

King Crimson probably hold the second place after the Grateful Dead with the number of releases 'from the vaults'. As of this review's time of writing, this is one of the more recent of those, dealing with a number of shows from December 1969, when the band was still touring in its original lineup. The version I have is the regular one that comes on two CD's; however, as far as I know, diehards can get a 4-CD box by ordering it directly from Fripp's company (no, I don't know the address). A good strategy, this: on one hand, it eliminates the need for bootlegs, on the other hand, record companies get their money's worth. Everybody's happy. Fine album title, too, although I don't think it reflects the actual state of things about the current King Crimson whose band members are still together (sometimes). Maybe that's an 'epitaph' for the McDonald-Giles-Lake incarnation of the band? Well, then it's about twenty-eight years late...
As you might guess, this 2-CD set includes mostly selections from the band's debut LP. Moreover, since there are several shows (one from New York's Fillmore East and two from San Francisco's Fillmore West, including what might have been the original band's last live show), plus a couple recordings from BBS Radio Sessions, most of these selections get reprised two or even three times - there are two 'Courts Of The Crimson King' and three 'Epitaphs' and '21st Century Schizoid Men'. However, there are quite a few different goodies: an early version of 'Pictures Of A City' (here called 'A Man, A City'); some Greg Lake vocal showcases ('Get Thy Bearings', 'Drop In'); some jazz improvisations ('Travel Weary Capricorn'); and a war march ('Mars').
If you ask my opinion, I'd say that the first disc is pretty much excessive (and I don't even mention the two additional discs in the care of the record company). I usually prefer to concentrate on disc two - the complete second show at Fillmore West, which has all the three epics from In The Court Of The Crimson King, plus 'Drop In', 'A Man A City' and 'Mars'. Why? Because the first disc has all the same things (except for 'Drop In'), some of them in very bad sound quality (the radio versions hiss and crackle too much for my ears), and the only things that aren't featured on disc 2 is the stupid 'Travel Weary Capricorn', the only groovy thing about which is that they reproduce the Spanish guitar line that connects 'Wild Honey Pie' to 'The Continuing Story Of Bungalow Bill', otherwise it ain't impressive; and yet another jazz-rock improvisation 'Get Thy Bearings', with a brief, but good, but inessential Greg Lake vocal and a lot of elementary sax/bass noodling that you can get in spades on any other album. So let's talk about the second San Francisco show.
I'd say that the band doesn't sound as polished live as it does in the studio. Of course, the music is extremely complex and very hard to play, and we have to give them credit for what they're doing. And yet, they stumble and make errors much too often for these records to match the originals - when I compare the prowess of this incarnation with later ones, such as heard on USA or Absent Lovers, the inferiority of the playing is fairly obvious. Michael Giles' drumming, so immaculate in the studio, sounds especially flat and annoying (although I suppose it's also due to acoustic reasons), and even the Mellotron isn't as fascinating as it used to be - McDonald never achieved such precision on stage as in the studio. It also sometimes seems that some of the songs, especially the lengthy improvisations, are played with the special aim of displaying McDonald's talents as a keyboard/sax player, and this sometimes gets tedious, even unbearable (like on the excruciatingly long mid section of 'A Man A City'). However, Fripp's guitar playing and Lake's singing are immaculate, and Lake aptly demonstrates his talents on the wonderful 'Drop In' (a drug song, I suppose, although I don't have the lyrics). '21st Century Schizoid Man' goes off fine - they lose it on some of the faster jazzy sections, but Greg manages to preserve and even double the energy level without encoding his voice. 'A Man, A City' features a terrific jazz riff, being a worthy successor of 'Schizoid Man', so I'm even able to forgive the lengthy Mellotron doodling in the middle of the tune. And the dreary, ominous cover of Holst's 'Mars' is one of the most frightening interplanetary odes I ever heard. It's kinda hard to sit through these ten minutes of 'doo-doo-doom doo-doo-doo-doom doom doo-doo-doom', but just take a listen to it in headphones and I'll be damned if you don't remember the experience for eternity: the atmosphere is gripping and increasingly fascinating as they mount a mathematically precise 'climactic' tension that can only be compared to a similar 'calculation' in Pink Floyd's 'Careful With That Axe Eugene'.
In short, just a good album. And hey, maybe it's really stupid to complain about the sound and the rough playing. That's what you should be expecting from such a record, right? So it's probably not their faults if they couldn't get all their complex equipment to function correctly before the BBC micorphones. On the other hand, it's nice to hear these flawless, but soulless studio recordings come to life on stage, even if they're a bit sloppy. Still, don't bother about buying this if you're not a diehard - get the studio record instead. If you're wild about it, don't hesitate to grab this one: three more versions of '21 Century Schizoid Man'! Ain't that close to a real schizoid paradise?

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IN THE WAKE OF POSEIDON

Year Of Release: 1970
Record rating = 9
Overall rating = 12

Still first class, just a little too similar in tone to the first record without being groundbreaking.
Best song: PICTURES OF A CITY

One of the most confused albums in the whole history of King Crimson, this was recorded not exactly in the wake of Poseidon, rather in the wake of McDonald's and Giles' departure from the band. The latter might not have been exactly tragic since Giles was never an extremely prolific drummer, but the loss of McDonald was truly a terrible blow for the band that lost its Mellotron soul and main songwriting talent. Okay, so the Mellotron wasn't exactly lost: Fripp took over the instrument and in the process created the image of a whacked multi-instrumentalist picking the guitar with one hand and tapping the keyboards with the other. However, McDonald's songwriting was a somewhat harder task to replace, and this is where Fripp lost the battle.
Another blow was Greg Lake's sudden decision to quit the band and join ELP in the middle of the recording sessions. Thankfully, he decided to fulfil his obligations by faithfully helping old friend Bob with both the bass parts and, more importantly, the singing: all of the tracks but one feature Greg's beautiful voice, and only 'Cadence And Cascade' showcases his replacement, Gordon Haskell. Other replacements include Mel Collins on sax and flute and Keith Tippet on piano; old friend Peter Giles helped on base, and Michael Giles still filled in on drums, although this would be his last appearance with the band. Not that it matters - the sooner you bring in Bill Bruford, the better.
Okay, the songs. If you heard Epitaph before this one (which, strange enough, happens to be my case), you'll be glad to discover some old numbers. 'Pictures Of A City' is the same as 'A Man, A City', for one, and it sounds infinitely better in the studio than it did live: the band is well-oiled, the booming verses rock almost as hard as '21st Century Schizoid Man', and the crazy middle part is overwhelming, although the best part about the song is still the famous jazz riff that introduces the song. I still regard it as one of King Crimson's finest creations. 'The Devil's Triangle' is a re-write of 'Mars' with a little more complicated arrangement. It is said to feature three different parts, but they're not that different really, except for an unexpected change of time signature in the second half of the composition. As you might expect, it also superates the live version, and the level of consternation it produces is immeasurable, with all these creepy synth noises imitating... imitating what? An attack by aliens, I guess? Whatever, it's just a great song, tons better than anything Yes could ever hope to produce.
The other compositions are new, but they're okay. There's a 'I Talk To The Wind'-style ballad - 'Cadence And Cascade', with horrendously stupid lyrics set to a nice, luxuriant, piano-laden melody. It might be deemed a little too pop sounding for King Crimson, but hey, let us not forget that 'prog rock' rarely sounds like 'rock', all of these Yes and Genesis and even Pink Floyd tunes are more 'pop' than 'rock', partly due to the domination of keyboards. In fact, this King Crimson stuff generally rocks much harder than the other prog rock bands, just because Fripp rarely let the guitar be overshadowed by other instruments. So why shouldn't 'Cadence And Cascade' sound poppy? It's a good song. The single 'Cat Food', on the other hand, is a rock song, dominated by weird avantgarde dissonant piano bursts and Lake's eerie shouting that is strangely similar to his style on early ELP records. Well, why strangely? Early ELP records belong to the same time period. The lyrics are dumb just as well, but who cares? They have been written by Pete Sinfield.
That said, I'd like to prattle a little about the title track. Essentially it's just an inferior rewrite of 'Epitaph' because the melody's just the same; the main difference is that it's a bit louder, with synths and Mellotrons complementing Lake's lilting vocals where they were mostly silent on 'Epitaph'. The lyrics are also inferior; 'Epitaph' at least boasted great lines like 'the wall on which the prophets wrote is cracking at the seams', this one mostly has lines like 'Plato's spawn cold ivyed eyes snare truth in bone and globe' (Jon Anderson, let's shake hands). So you could just consider it a ripped-off step down the stairs. And yet, it has a charm of its own that's lacking on 'Epitaph'. The synths give it a more classical feel, and there's a certain grandeur, once again, which Yes could never attain, maybe because this one is more structured, well-cared-for and just more listener-friendly. I enjoy it as hell, and so should you. Fripp might not be a great songwriter, but he certainly can monkey other people's ideas with a lot of verve, and God bless him for that.
The only slight letdown on the album, in fact (if you forget about the fact that at times the whole record seems like a pale shadow of In The Court), are the three reprises of 'Peace', the really pretentious one. 'I am the ocean lit by the flame, I am the mountain, peace is my name'. It mostly features Lake singing accapella, and this only makes the song more nauseating. Still, these reprises are short, and they rarely spoil the overall experience. A great, great album - yes, a big rewrite of the band's debut in general, but at least the melodies are different and at least they don't play in the AC/DC style. Get it!

Cadence and cascade are waiting for your ideas

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LIZARD

Year Of Release: 1970
Record rating = 4
Overall rating = 7

Rock is gone, long live pretentious pseudo-classicism! As bleak and tedious as only can be.
Best song: CIRKUS

One of King Crimson's main features was a constant change of sound, sometimes over a period of two or three albums, sometimes in the course of one recording session. Reason? No other reason than a constant come-and-go in the studio. This one already features Gordon Haskell as the regular bass player/singer, Keith Tippet and Mel Collins have asserted their constant status, and Andy McCulloch is recruited on drums. Surrounded by this company, Fripp has radically shifted the band's sound from 'jazz' to 'classical', although the saxes and tinkling bar pianos still have a prominent part. However, this was probably the worst shift in the whole history of the band leading to its arguably worst album. By totally dropping the groovy hard rock elements of 'Schizoid Man' and 'Pictures Of A City' and refusing the 'epic' style of 'Epitaph' and 'In The Wake Of Poseidon', King Crimson have suddenly become something that Yes would become in a couple of years, only with worse musicianship and far fewer musical ideas than Close To The Edge. True, technically speaking Lizard is an advance over the style the band found itself stuck on with In The Wake Of Poseidon - this doesn't sound like a carbon copy of their debut record. But the shift was clearly made from 'epic' to 'avantgarde', and where earliest Crimson pictured flashing majestic panoramas, Lizard just paints a big question mark, despite the ambitious song titles.
The melodies are getting more and more complicated, so that their debut album already sounds like children's games compared to this one. But complicacy doesn't mean beauty: much too often it seems to me that the band was just absent-mindedly jamming in the studio and stuffing the record with any sound sequences that seemed to have at list a tiny bit of cohesiveness. The instrumentation is deadly dull: Fripp's guitar is usually buried deep down under the pianos, flutes and Mellotron, and these sound tired and flat as well. Even if he did manage to get over 'Cadence And Cascade' on the last record, Gordon Haskell eventually turns out to be a horrible singer, at least when put next to Lake: apparently the band soon became aware of the fact as well - which resulted in Haskell's leaving the band before it even had a chance to tour the album. Even on the album itself, they often do a lot of tricks to mask Haskell's lack of good voice: 'Dawn Song' is almost uncomfortably quiet, 'Happy Family' has Haskell's voice encoded by goofy electronic effects that sound totally murky and cacophonic, unlike the far superior experience with Lake's voice on 'Schizoid Man' (which proves that electronic encoding only enhances the power of a truly powerful voice and makes a disgusting voice sound even more disgusting), and 'Prince Rupert Awakes' even has a guest star - none other than Jon Anderson himself. It's no coincidence, in fact: I already said that this is the most Yesish-sounding album in Fripp's entire career.
As for the actual songs, only one has something close to a memorable melody, which is the album opener, 'Cirkus'. Sinfield's lyrics are at least three thousand miles below 'monstrous' (another major flaw of the album: the lyrics throughout don't have the least sense or even cohesiveness, once again bringing Jon Anderson to mind), but the song itself is somewhat pretty in its eeriness, and the short, but heavy guitar/Mellotron interludes between verses are one of the few moments of genuine majesty on the album. However, the three other songs on side 1 don't go anywhere at all. 'Indoor Games' is a vague lightweight imitation of 'Pictures Of A City', but it has none of the elements that made the latter so ear-pleasing: it's quiet, slow, and so dang monotonous it makes me wanna go to sleep on the spot. Perhaps it's Haskell's sore throat that irritates me so much, but I have yet to hear this sung by a more skilful singer to convince me of the song's worthiness. 'Happy Family' is essentially a jam with the already-mentioned electronic Haskell vocals (one of the worst examples of voice encoding in my life, in fact). And the short, but totally unsubstantial ballad 'Lady Of The Dancing Water' is certainly no 'I Talk To The Wind'. Darn it, it's not even 'Cadence And Cascade'.
The second side is even more bloodcurdling - in a certain sense. It is entirely occupied with one lengthy, multi-part suite - namely, 'Lizard' (there we go with these early Seventies' sidelong songs again). Starts off fine: 'Prince Rupert Awakes', even if it is sung by Anderson, is just a standard, catchy pop song, a significant piece of relief after the brain-muddling pseudo-classical bullshit of the first side. Unfortunately, that's only about four and a half minutes of the whole side. The rest is mostly dominated by more lengthy instrumental jams, centered around Fripp's Mellotron and trying to sound pompous and awesome - but ultimately failing. A couple of moments here and there might seem attractive, but these are just small drops in a sea of boredom. What composer they were trying to rip off is beyond me, since I'm not a big specialist in classical music, but whoever he was, he wasn't very good at his job. I do admit that 'Prince Rupert's Lament' is kinda atmospheric, though, and for some strange reason 'Big Top', the final short bit of the whole piece, is structured as a... as a dissonant waltz speeding up with the 'chewn tape' effect in the end. A funny, if a bit retarded, hoot.
Funny how both sides of the album start out promisingly and then only degenerate more and more. Anyway, skip this album if you're a big fan of '21st Century Schizoid Man'. However, if you're a diehard prog worshipper that feeds daily on listening to 'Karn Evil 9' and 'Close To The Edge', this might be just for you. You're warned.

Indoor games are over. Now mail your ideas

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ISLANDS

Year Of Release: 1971
Record rating = 6
Overall rating = 9

At least this time the pretentious pseudo-classicism is pretty. It works on the ear-wobbly level.
Best song: SONG OF THE GULLS

Another year, another line-up: Gordon Haskell is gone forever (let us not lament the fact) and is replaced by Boz Burrell, or simply Boz, on bass and vocals. Why was it so that every Sixties/Seventies King Crimson line-up had the bassist singing up there? Idle question, but fact is, Boz ain't much better than Haskell, and it's a good thing he stayed for one and one album only - the last one of the First Crimson Epoch. Another replacement is Ian Wallace on drums, and Keith Tippett is only marked as a 'featured player'.
The album itself continues Fripp's careful progression as a composer - he's the only songwriter on the whole album, with Sinfield contributing the lyrics, as usual. Apparently not quite satisfied with the sound of Lizard, he decided to get even weirder on the album, combining his classical excourses with unlimited avantgardism and sound experiments that on a technical level probably were innovative for his time, but on the practical side they rather belonged to 1967 with its 'every noise that hasn't been put on a record before is art' principle. The result is a total and absolute commercial and artistic failure, as you might suggest? Well... mostly so. To start with, the first seventeen minutes of the album don't offer us even a single truly effective musical idea (and that's most of the first side, if you're bad with numbers!) 'Formentera Lady' starts as a mellow, sentimental ballad with an uninteresting, but pleasant melody, like another 'Moonchild' or something from the barrel, but in just a few minutes it is transformed into a horrible, head-splitting atonal mess with multiple off-key choir vocalists and God only knows what else they managed to insert there to make it even more unlistenable. But just as you're ready to take a large breath and say 'it's all over', you get carried away into the seven-minute long 'Sailor's Tale' (an instrumental, contrary to its name), that makes you sit through seven more minutes of the same stuff, the only slightly entertaining moment being a bizarre Fripp guitar solo that doesn't get me clap my hands and stomp my feet in ecstasy, of course, but at least pretends to have some musical value.
This is one of the most universally hated King Crimson products of the epoch, and I sincerely believe that most people who diss it totally just haven't had the nerve to sit through the entire album after that seventeen-minute long torture. A pity, this, because it really gets better later on. There are four more songs on the album, after all! And it looks to me like they decided to shove all the experimental garbage upfront and leave the good stuff as a tasty bone for good doggies that managed to get over the psychological shock. If I had the opportunity to give these two parts of the album two different ratings, I'd give the first part a 2 (thanks to that Fripp solo) and the second part an 8 or even a 9, because some of the numbers are dang beautiful.
First of all, there's Fripp's wonderful 'Prelude: Song Of The Gulls', a pure classical composition that could have maybe suited even Vivaldi were he to ever wander into Fripp's recording studio one summer day. I know, of course, that most classical compositions written to rockers are usually shameless rip-offs, but even so, they're often talented rip-offs, and 'Song Of The Gulls' is one of the most talented rip-offs. A couple of rockers, on the other hand, diversify the atmosphere so that it doesn't sound like 'The Symphonic Music Of King Crimson' or anything like that. Here I must state that Sinfield is the one that amazes me most of all on the album: he suddenly turns away from hallucinogenous, meaningless, pseudo-epic word combinations, and pens a couple of truly clever, although certainly not 'progressive', texts. 'The Letters' is a tale of two women battling over one man with quite unpredictable results (see for yourself), and it's a good one; and 'Ladies Of The Road', the most harsh song on the album, deals with the roadies and their, er, kinda immoral relations with band members. I don't know whether Sinfield wrote of his own experiences or he just created an abstract picture, but that's none of my business, I just like the song that rocks almost as hard as anything they did before. Finally, the closing title track, another nine-minute suite, has none of the band's current experimental chaff: it's just a keyboards/horns-driven ballad with charming lyrical imagery and a gentle, oh so gentle and lovin' melody. Unsubstantial? Sure, but why does everything have to be substantial? You can just relax to the song and let yourself be carried away to some imaginary island of yours. The horns at the end are absolutely gorgeous, I say, and you gotta believe me. Here's a song that a band like, say, Yes, could never have imagined just because it would sound much too simple and naive for them. (Instead, they prefer feeding us on trash like 'Siberian Khatru!' Oops, sorry there, just a little humorous tease for loyal Yes fans.) Great, if only they could get Lake to sing the song instead of Boz...
So you know, I'm just a little bit puzzled-over-dee-dee, over this album, because I can't really say whether the total breakdown of this first King Crimson 'movement' was a good or a bad thing. They could really do some good music, even in this state, and even with Fripp as main songwriter. Then again - bring on the Bruford/Wetton line-up for the more acknowledged musical triumphs. Then again, maybe not.

The letters! Where are your letters?

Your worthy comments:

Joel Larsson <[email protected]> (02.10.2000)

EARTHBOUND

Year Of Release: 1972
Record rating = 3
Overall rating = 6

Dumb collection of bad quality freestyle jazz improvisations: no worse choice could have made for their first live album.
Best song: 21ST CENTURY SCHIZOID MAN

This, no doubt, is the strangest item in the rich King Crimson catalog. A live album released in 1972 to commemorate the Collins/Wallace/Burrell lineup, it is out of print now and only available in the States as an import copy or, nowadays, but not for long, in Russia as a pirated edition. I was extremely glad that I was able to snatch a copy, but now that I finally assimilated this piece of plastic, I'm really not as happy, and I fully understand why it is out of print and has even less chance to reappear on the market than the far superior USA (reviewed below).
First of all, it's the sound quality. You know, I'm no sound quality lunatic. I don't go around putting down superbly written records just because the level of hiss on them is so great that you can faintly hear a few crackles on the highest volume level. I don't blame live records for crowd noises or anything like that; and I'm the least likely person to lower a record's rating just because an awesome melody was badly realised by an unskillful producer. But this is different. Most of this record sounds like it was recorded on a tiny tape recorder shoved deep down into the pocket of an audience member somewhere in the back rows (which it, more or less, was). The sound level jumps up and down all the time until your ears go totally berserk. The mix is horrendous - the drums overshadow everything else, so that Fripp's guitar is often left completely overboard. And this in 1972, when the recording techniques were, after all, significantly above the Live At The Hollywood Bowl level! Was this a joke or something? Okay, I can understand the fact that they could simply have no decent live recordings around; but that doesn't mean you have to throw all the bootleg-level crap you have hanging around on the market instead. Dumb.
Still, maybe I could get over with it (after all, I've heard worse sound quality on a couple older live records), if not for the song selections. Apart from the opening track, which I'll deal with later, all of the selections are crap. The only 'old' composition is a short extract from 'Sailor's Tale', the one where the band has some atonal fun with the mellotron, so that even if it's not more than four minutes long, it's totally ear-destructive. The other three tracks are all new, and one could hope for something exciting and entertaining. Instead, both 'Peoria' and the title track turn out to be half-baked, clumsy jazz/funk jams with endless guitar/Mellotron/sax solos and improvised vocals and scat singing from Burrell who tries very hard to be the next Louis Armstrong but seemingly fails. Taken together with the fact that the overall sound quality is below acceptable, the numbers are plain nasty. Come on now, if I want to put on a good jazz record, I'll certainly stick to Armstrong or Ellington or anybody else, and if I want some good funk, I'll stick to Sly. There is just nothing, nothing at all to redeem the songs, particularly 'Peoria' which doesn't even feature much guitar at all - just a few erratic wah-wah riffs from Fripp that are rather conventional and never stunning. But even they pale in comparison to the horrendous, fifteen-minute audience-mockery on 'Groon'. Formerly available as a relatively short B-side to 'Cat Food', the song is here transformed into a two-part suite, whose first part represents yet another cacophonous jazz improvisation, culminating in an obligatory drum solo from Ian Wallace, and whose second part is an atonal mess fit only for a tone-deaf masochist. Looks like Fripp and Mel Collins just took some time to smash their instruments in a very painful and cruel way, while Wallace continued his drum solo while letting all the sounds pass through special electronic devices. Needless to say, this is an offense to my ears, my soul and my fingers as I type this review, and I thank the Lord that this particular Crimson lineup didn't really last that long.
In all, I'd be ready to give the record a defiant 1, if not for one factor that redeems it. The record opens with such a kick-ass version of '21st Century Schizoid Man' that not commemorating its presence on the record with an up-pushing of the rating would seem a sacrilege. Sure, it's all poor sound quality, but if you get through that, you'll notice that Boz does a fantastic impersonating job, with his screeching, metallic vocals managing to almost overshadow Lake's voice (although the half-successful distortion of his vocals is just plain unnecessary), and Fripp plays some incredible, speedy, breath-taking solos (again, you have to almost dig them out from underneath the drums, but please do so). Before giving way back to the main melody, the band leads us through an entire series of furious climaxes which leave you breathless. Indeed, the record is worth owning for this track alone - many people consider it the definitive live version of 'Schizoid Man', and I can hardly find any counterarguments except for sound quality. Of course, nobody would shell out megabucks for an album with one good song; but if you see somebody throwing the CD out of the window, make sure you're standing under it, and you're guaranteed at least eleven minutes of pure thrill. Of course, if you're one of the S&M types, you'll get all fourty-five minutes of it.

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<[email protected]> (12.02.2000)

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LARKS' TONGUES IN ASPIC

Year Of Release: 1973
Record rating = 9
Overall rating = 12

A fine, nearly perfect collection of experimental superprofessional jamming - like everything King Crimson did ever since.
Best song: LARKS' TONGUES IN ASPIC PART TWO

I'm still a bit stumped as to what concerns this record (and most of the following ones, in fact). It presents a completely new King Crimson; in a certain way, one might even argue that not until Larks' Tongues In Aspic did Fripp find the stable formula for the band that would finally set it in a definite and unique niche of its own. Of course, this is partly due to the new lineup: ex-Yes drummer Bill Bruford brings in a hard-hitting, polyrhythmic, precise style of drumming unsurpassed by anyone (yes, he plays drums better on the live 'Schizoid Man' than Giles could ever hope for!); new bassist John Wetton has a talent for songwriting and the strongest voice since the happy young days of Greg Lake; and violin/Mellotron player David Cross is at least highly distinctive. (The bizarre, eccentric percussionist Jamie Muir also plays on the album, but he left before it was even released, or at least before they started touring it; his wild stage antics have become a legend among Crimson fans, but he still remains a mystery to the somewhat less educated fan - like me). But this is only one part of the story.
The other, the more important one, is that Sinfield is no longer a member of the band - at this point he quit and took the place of court lyricist for ELP (Brain Salad Surgery). And the new 'textwriter', Robert Palmer-James, doesn't really have a single chance to have any influence on the album. Because from now on the lyrics don't play any part on any King Crimson record. The band concentrates on the music - more than half of the album is purely instrumental, and the lyrics on the sung tunes are not only meaningless, they're even imageless, weak half-parodies on cumbersome prog ravings or bleak social critique ('Easy Money'). But nobody gives a damn. The band is now completely faceless, churning out one lengthy, hard-rockin', experimental jam after another. And probably the only two aims that they had while recording this album were a) making the music as complex and diverse-sounding as possible (like Yes) and b) giving the band members a chance to have as much self-indulgence as possible (like Yes! like Yes!)
Still, I must say that I'd much rather listen to King Crimson's self-indulgence than to Yes self-indulgence. The reason is simple: King Crimson music might be just as convoluted and hard to digest, but at least it isn't pretentious. Yes did everything to put you on, to convince you that the things they did were 'high art' and 'mystical philosophy', while in reality it was little more than a fraud. Fripp, Wetton and Bruford just sit there and play their instruments. I'm not head over heels in love with the album, but at least I'm never offended by it, while I'm certainly offended by, say, Tales From Topographic Oceans which invite me to not just enjoy the music (which I don't), but to give in to the music, to feel cathartic about it. Yes want you to break your head while meditating on the hidden sense of their albums' titles; King Crimson just pick a title that has no meaning at all, and I doubt whether even the most dedicated fans ever tried guessing the esoteric semantics of the expression Larks' Tongues In Aspic. Jon Anderson can go to hell for as long as I care; Robert Fripp can stay a while. Especially considering the huge number of exciting musical ideas presented herein.
Larks' Tongues In Aspic is certainly not an album for memorizing, less much for singing along. But while it's on, you might just as well get your kicks out of it - it took me a long time, but now I sure do. None of the actual 'songs' are bad, except for maybe the slightly throwaway ballad 'Book Of Saturday' that has never managed to fascinate me, sounding rather muffled and timid against the rip-roaring background of everything else; still, it's short and not at all unpleasant. Not so with the lengthy, slow, bombastic 'Exiles': the main theme on here is terrific, highlighted by an exciting, sensitive violin melody from Cross; I feel that with Lake replacing Wetton on the operatic, 'Epitaph'-style vocals, and with the omittance of certain chaotic passages that don't really mar the impression but seem to take a bit more time than necessary, the number would have been a true classic. 'Easy Money' is also a good one: it starts out with a weird, 'disrupted' rhythm pattern that, taken together with Wetton's eerie singing, kinda presages that New Wave sound, and soon turns into a moody, ominous Pink Floydish rocker - much better than that band's 'Money', actually, both in terms of musicianship and creativity.
However, it's the instrumental compositions that do the job. Experimental and freaky, they are nevertheless excellent mood setters - and there's a certain mathematical precision about the way they are built up that hasn't ever been matched by any band. There isn't any particular "mystical feeling" about them, but there are at least three redeeming factors: a) the wonder of their construction, b) the strange catchiness of most of the themes, c) they rock! In parts, they rock harder than your average Led Zeppelin, verging on the Sabbathy edge of heavy metal; and the metallic themes are so intricately woven into the general pattern that you can't but wonder at the band's intelligence.
'Larks' Tongues In Aspic Part I' opens the album on a high note: the haunting percussion, Fripp's roaring guitar tone and David Cross' pleasant (not distorted, as in the beginning of 'Formentera Lady') violin create a, well, 'melody' that you can be entertained by while doing something useful like playing Doom or picking your nose. The mounting of the tension is supreme: the percussion seamlessly flows into the violins, Fripp adds a few guitar lines of "warning", and the band launches into its mastodontic heavy metal schtick - only to revert to the dangerous-sounding violins again. Creepy. But 'Talking Drum' and 'LTIA Part II' are even better. 'Talking Drum' slowly builds up over seven minutes from a simple repetitive bass/percussion pattern to a wild, painful, Eastern-influenced fast rocker dominated by schizophrenic violin and paranoid guitar, which bleeds on your nerves until it all comes down to a blistering crash and resolves itself in the band's signature tune, 'Larks' Tongues In Aspic Part II'; here Bob suddenly turns into Ritchie Blackmore and delivers an unabashed hard rock tune, partly relieved by Dave's violin and the little 'larks shrieking' in the middle. The introductory riff is one of the classic "prog riffs" of all time and is just great to headbang to - 'nuff said.
All in all, the record takes some getting used to; I know I only managed to value its preciousness after a long long while. But strange enough, it now seems pretty accessible to me. Actually, the big problem lies in the chaotic structure of some of the instrumental parts. Once you've sorted that out, the melodies suddenly appear to be catchy and exciting, not to mention innovative at the same time. While there may not be a lot of "meaning" on here, music-wise the album has it all - from gritty first-rate hard rock to the shimmering violin beauty.

Easy money is not what you'll get, but I'll be glad if you mail your ideas

Your worthy comments:

The DeFabios <[email protected]> (03.06.99)

Joel Larsson <[email protected]> (30.11.2000)

Ben Greenstein <[email protected]> (15.12.2000)

THE NIGHT WATCH

Year Of Release: 1997
Record rating = 5
Overall rating = 8

A totally excessive live release. The band is kinda feeble, too. Nobody needs this record.
Best song: EASY MONEY

Out of the three recent double-CD archive releases (I'm not counting the obscure made-on-order-only tons of DGM archive packages), this one baffles me most of all. While Epitaph presents us with an interesting, raw, enthusiastic side of the earliest incarnation of the band that's otherwise unavailable, The Night Watch offers us more or less everything that we already had before. The recording is taken from a single show played at the Concertgebouw in Amsterdam in November 1973, featuring the Cross-Wetton-Bruford lineup. About half of it consists of the recent material from Larks' Tongues, and the other half later appeared on Starless And Bible Black - I mean, not just the songs, but these exact live versions from this exact show (with a few overdubs now and then). Add to this that much of these songs also appeared live on 1975's USA (reviewed below), and you get a record whose existence is, roughly speaking, unexplainable.
But anyway, who am I to understand the deep delvings of a mind as twisted and uncontrolled as that of Mr Robert Fripp? A nobody. So I patiently go, shell out my hard-earned roubles for this package (approximately four dollars in the U.S. equivalent), and sit through a couple of listens before shelving it deep, deep, deep, deep, deep... sorry. The show is not bad, by any means. What mars it is the feeling that the band is feeling slightly uneasy, for no particular reason. Thus, I'm not at all impressed by the obligatory '21st Century Schizoid Man' closing the show. First of all, I now understand fully why they had to distort Wetton's vocals on the official live USA - without the overdubbed distortion, he just can't collect himself to rise to the heights that Greg Lake once used to ascend - even if their voices are very similar. And what is '21st Century Schizoid Man' without the aggressive metallic booming voice but a weak parody? And the lengthy instrumental passage is boring - first time ever in a 'Schizoid Man' version. Not to mention that Cross was simply sleeping at his Mellotron - there's naught to capture your attention but Fripp's guitar, and even Fripp cannot last forever. And he's playing just an okayish solo. Okayish. Not the wild apocalyptic licks of old, just a normal guitar solo with a lot of distortion, but pretty generic. As if he had something with his fingers going on. Pathetic. As a result, the tune sounds thin, underarranged and not at all as impressive as before.
Otherwise, the record is still plagued with problems. Since I already reviewed Starless, I won't drab about stuff like 'Fracture' or 'Starless And Bible Black' or 'Lament', etc.; check them out in the following review. As for the Larks' Tongues material, well, they mostly just duplicate the album - there's everything but 'Larks' Tongues In Aspic, Part I' (pity, that: I'd prefer they keep off 'Book Of Saturday' and some of the improvs). 'Larks' Tongues In Aspic, Part II' is here, and it's done well, but lacks some of the crunch they managed to deliver almost red-hot in the studio. I must confess, though, that the psycho build-up of 'Talking Drum' which is then resolved into 'Part II' is carried from the studio into a live entourage with gusto; but since it was so calculated and mechanically precise from the very beginning, there's hardly any difference between the live and studio versions. On the other hand, the sung songs are sometimes improved: 'Exiles', for instance, is done with inspiration, and manages to impress me even more than the studio version. And 'Easy Money' is a real treat.
The only track that can't be found anywhere is 'The Fright Watch', some sort of sequel to 'Night Watch' which did make it onto Starless And Bible Black; as is usual with King Crimson improvisations, it isn't a heck of a lot of fun if you're not a diehard, what with the dissonance, noises and stuff, but in this particular case it functions as a 'prequel' to 'Talking Drum' which, in turn, functions as a prequel to 'Part II', and the whole sequence should probably be enjoyed as a single, multipart "experience" with its series of climaxes and 'breakdowns'. Even if it also tunes up the boredom factor.
In any case, unless you really feed on atonal instrumental passages, listening to the album in one sitting is excruciating - the vocal sections take only about a fifteenth part of the whole record, and the rest, as usual, is jams, jams, jams and jams, dissonant, rambling, clumsy, erratic and many of them - particularly those that don't raise any special emotions - horrendously dated. And, like I said, 'excessive' is the word. This is the definitive throwaway live album, intended exclusively for completists. Since it's double, you won't lose anything by rejecting it and acquiring both Larks' Tongues and Starless And Bible Black instead, especially since there are no 'Larks' Tongues In Aspic Part I' or 'Great Deceiver' here, both of which are so great. I surmise nobody really dies to hear 'The Fright Watch'? Oh, actually there's one more thing: it's very very nice to hear Fripp's stage banter (unless it's not Fripp who's talking). He's soooo gallant, saying 'thank you' all the time and complementing the ladies in the audience. Of course, this only punctuates King Crimson's status as an 'elitist' band, absolutely unfit for a stadium show or something like that. Well - at least the sound quality is acceptable.

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STARLESS AND BIBLE BLACK

Year Of Release: 1974
Record rating = 5
Overall rating = 8

More of the same, with even less inspired and much more atonal jams. I just don't see no particular reason why I should have to sit through it.
Best song: THE GREAT DECEIVER

I can really think of few starts as deceptive as the intro to Starless And Bible Black. No sooner do you push the Start button that you're totally taken aback by a thunderstorm of sound: lightning-speed heavy guitar riffs, monstrously fast drumming and, above all, a superior David Cross violin line that kicks the shit out of any casual listener! 'Wow', you think, 'they're back! This is the record I've been waiting for since In The Court! Keep it up, boys!' This is 'The Great Deceiver', one of the best successes of the Wetton-Cross lineup, a terrific tune that's matched by interesting lyrics on commercialized religion, a goofy Wetton tone and masterful changes in key and tempo. If all the album contained but this one song, I'd easily have given it a much higher rating. Unfortunately, such is not the case.
You know, after re-reading my original review of Larks' Tongues, I became somewhat angered with myself - it seemed I had dedicated most of it to thoughts on the general appeal of the 1973-74 lineup and said too little about the music itself, maybe just one small paragraph. So I set out to rewrite it... and found out I couldn't (I did rewrite it later on, but that's another story). I just couldn't write about this music, because I didn't know what to write about it. Well, turns out that Starless And Bible Black is a far more complicated case.
If I were a musician, I could prattle about key changes and staccatos and weird chord progressions and all that stuff, but I'm not a musician and I don't pretend to be one. And as for the emotional level, these songs just don't raise any emotions in me, neither good nor bad. It's like modern jazz, you know: one might admire the technical and professional level of the musicians and witness the new trends and inventions, but it never gets me to feel anything. Same goes for most of Starless And Bible Black, a pseudo-studio record (most of the tracks were recorded live, with the audience dubbed out and some instrumental backing dubbed over) that continues in the vein of Larks' Tongues but has only maybe about half of the impact of that one (not that its impact was enormous in the first place). Instead of compact, concise musical pieces, Starless concentrates on the band's live improvisation, and the only thing it turns out to prove is that avantgarde could be pretty exciting and tame in the hands of experts when harnessed in the studio, but it can also be messy, pointless and self-indulgent on stage. (Unfortunately, the same disastrous experience would be repeated twenty years later: Starless relates to Larks' Tongues more or less like the horror of THRaKaTTaK relates to THRaK). Thus, if time has altered my initial scepticism towards Larks, it has only worsened my feel towards this incoherent mess.
It does have one more fine tune, of course, which is 'The Night Watch', an enthusiastic ballad very much in the vein of what the Moody Blues were doing about three or four years ago. But the rest is weak: there's just one more 'song' in the traditional sense of it, a hard rock ballad ('Lament') that ain't impressive at all, and almost thirty minutes on the record are devoted to instrumental jams that just don't sound good to me. Some of them are even nasty, like the stuttering, constantly falling apart 'We'll Let You Know', an ill-planned and badly performed groove. The second side is entirely dominated by two compositions: the nine-minute title track and the eleven-minute 'Fracture'. Both are extremely similar in that they're multi-part and you never notice when one ends and is succeeded by another. The effect is similar to what they did before, but everything is a step less tasty, a step more clumsy and therefore two steps less exciting. 'Larks' Tongues In Aspic, Parts 1 & 2' at least boasted interesting riffs, cleverly intertwined with violin patterns and constructed so as to let everybody know when to climax and when to relax. These two jams are messy to the point of being annoying, and while the effect at a concert might have been amusing or even breathtaking, I just don't see what should I expect from these on a studio record. I'll be careful enough so as not to state that they suck (because I'm really not sure), but one thing's for certain: after listening to this album four times in a row, I'll probably put it on the fifth time somewhere next Spring. Or the Spring after that. Or even later. At least, I'll live out the rest of the twentieth century without having to enjoy 'Fracture'. (Which reminds me: does everyone remember clearly that the twenty-first century actually begins in the year 2001 and not in the year 2000, as the ignorant mass media people all teach us? Boycott these ceremonies, people, they're putting you ON!)
That said, I quite enjoy 'Trio', a luvvly classical excourse that's probably a trio because Bruford doesn't drum on it. It's nowhere near as good as 'Song Of The Gulls', but at least it gives us a chance to breathe in some real music before immerging us again into the complicated world of brainless prog rock. On the whole, even if you adored Larks' Tongues In Aspic (and there's a good chance you would), there's a high probability that you will dread this album anyway. Of course, if you're one of those audacious avantgarde freaks who only acknowledge King Crimson and Throbbing Gristle and think that you have moved far beyond the conception of "ordinary song", feel free to indulge Even then, maybe a better choice would be to acquire Night Watch, from which most of these tunes were taken, and just forget this record ever existed in the first place.

We'll let you know! Just mail your ideas and we'll let you know when we post 'em!

Your worthy comments:

Duane Zarakov <[email protected]> (09.06.2000)

Joel Larsson <[email protected]> (16.09.2000)

Paul Walker <[email protected]> (10.12.2000)

Ben Greenstein <[email protected]> (15.12.2000)

RED

Year Of Release: 1974
Record rating = 9
Overall rating = 12

Better, because the jams are mostly structured and melodical, and there are good songs here - hey, this might be their best in a long time!
Best song: FALLEN ANGEL

Even less tunes on this one - it boasts but five tracks. Less members, too - Cross quit in the middle of the sections with the band carrying on as a trio (they even have their portraits on the front cover, quite an unusual treat for a King Crimson album; in fact, quite an unusual treat for any prog band album). But certainly better in quality than SABB and maybe even better than LTIA; at least, this is inarguably the most easily accessible and immediately likeable record of the band's entire "prog-metal" period. I thought primarily that this was the result of a somewhat more careful and attentive approach to songwriting, but turns out that I was wrong: parts of it were recorded live just as well as parts of SABB. Well, guess some things just can't be solved easily, can they? Anyway, live or not, this album is more listenable than its predecessor because it is mostly music, not just pointless and uninspired jamming. It's also tremendously heavy, maybe the heaviest album the band ever did, and that provides a level of energy that was often missing earlier when you needed it so badly. Of course, heaviness is not a virtue by itself - you have to think of good riffs and clever production, and that's on here, too.
The first side on here is pretty much spotless, aside from a couple overlong solos, but you just have to get used to these things when you're dealing with King Crimson. The title track is a great rifffest: beginning with a captivating ascending guitar line, it is soon metamorphosed into a convincing heavy melody that is, while not fast enough to get the laurel wreath of 'Great Deceiver', nothing short of genius. Kurt Cobain would be proud of that fat guitar/bass interplay, that's for sure. Then there's 'Fallen Angel', yet another Moody Blues-ish ballad sung quite convincingly by Wetton. In the hands of Justin Hayward this song might have been turned into a medieval-stylicised, romantic chef-d'aeuvre; here it just feels good and kinda awkward, but it works all the same. Also, Wetton's vocals are suspiciously reminiscent of Lake's (I guess he should have had no trouble with singing 'Schizoid Man' on stage even without the distorted vocals), and this gives the song a certain ELP feel, so maybe that's why I like it (I mean, it gives it the Lake feel, not the Emerson feel). It does take some time to enjoy the overlong jam session in the middle, and the song could have been far more great and hard-hitting in a shorter, abbreviated version; but eventually, its grim, spooky noodling grows on you, creating stately gothic moods the likes of which you could previously only find in obscure Krautrock compositions. Finally, 'One More Red Nightmare' is one more classic, based on another, though this time a bit more lackluster, heavy riff, but what gives me the shivers about the song is the way Wetton sings the lyrics: his usual 'careless', a trifle intentionally off-key vocals, quite often irritating otherwise, make the tune totally! It's about fear of flying, as far as I can see, and the rushed, speeded, stuttering vocals, together with the refrain 'one more red nightmaaaare!', really give the impression of a paranoid fear of something. I get so excited that I don't even notice the usual solo wanking all over the place.
Unfortunately, the second side starts on a really low note (the one that costs the album one rating point - sorry Red lovers), the usual trademark of 'bad Crimson': 'Providence' is the same kind of atonal, messy jam that 'Fracture' was on the last record and even worse. Recorded with Cross still at the violin, it mostly features bits and pieces of drums and bass recorded over this stupid "violing" that seems to drag and drag on forever - just more dated experimentation. A bad idea that reduces the album to much less than fourty minutes of listenable music. Oh well, at least we have 'Starless'. You might think it's horrendous just by looking at the running time - 12:18. Don't worry, it isn't. A rare case when a lengthy King Crimson jam is endurable in all of its lengthiness. Apparently an outtake from the previous album (although it really is hard to talk in terms of outtakes when we deal with constant mixtures of new studio tracks and live improvisations), it should have appeared there instead of the far inferior 'Starless And Bible Black'. A dark, bitter tune, it's probably the closest they ever got to replicating the bliss of 'Epitaph' (Fripp even uses the same guitar pedal he used on the intro to 'Epitaph'). There are tons of beautiful, emotional guitar lines, Wetton's singing has never been better, and the lengthy solo passage is breathtaking. It seems that Fripp keeps repeating the same note on his guitar over and over, but he manages to build up the tension so well that I'm left almost stunned - just because of the very nature of this paradox: this is maybe the simplest musical idea that Bob has ever put to life and it works so much better than tons of far more complicated ones. Actually, the whole album, except for that wretched 'Providence', is simpler and more 'available' than the previous two, and it shows that even if the Frippergang's main purpose was to experiment with song structure, chord progressions and bizarre instrumentation in the wildest mode possible, they hadn't still gone as far as to forget the basics of songwriting business entirely. Red, more so than any album since In The Court Of The Crimson King, demonstrates that they still knew how to make great simple tunes and that King Crimson was still a band making music, not just weird, psychic (psychic, not psychedelic) background noises for one-day consumption. Would they take notice of their 'reincarnation', you think?
Unfortunately not. Fripp disbanded the band shortly after, saying they'd turned into dinosaurs and their place was in the trash bin - more than two years before the punks reminded all the others of the same. Silly thing, really - if he'd disbanded the band after Starless, I'd certainly understand that. But disband them just as they were becoming used to writing and performing good music? Man, these proggers are one weird bunch of starpers!!!

One more red nightmare: Commies bashing my reviews!!

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Ben Greenstein <[email protected]> (15.12.2000)

USA

Year Of Release: 1975
Record rating = 7
Overall rating = 10

A decent live album, showing how much CRRRUNCH they actually could deliver on stage...
Best song: 21ST CENTURY SCHIZOID MAN (as usual)

A live recording from the band's 1974 tour, featuring the four-person lineup (with Cross on violin, that is). Actually, that's all. What can be said about an averagely good King Crimson live LP that's not particularly illuminating but at least a huge improvement over Earthbound? Okay, since it seems to be currently out of print and I don't know if it will ever reappear, what with all these innumerable releases from the vaults, I guess I could just as well say a few words about it.
The material mostly draws on Larks' Tongues In Aspic (as if this should surprise you), plus one title from SABB and the obligatory 'Schizoid Man' (it's a well-known fact that Fripp had renounced everything from the 1969-71 past epochs except for that one tasty cookie); besides that, there's also a previously unpublished jam called 'Asbury Park'. The track selection could've been better of course (where the hell are 'Great Deceiver' or 'Night Watch', for instance?), but then again, it could have been worse (no 'Fracture' or title track from SABB, thanks Heaven; come to think of it, that would be a strange thing to include them since they were already recorded live from the very beginning). As it is, the album manages to look almost totally inoffensive. 'Asbury Park' tends to drag, of course, like most of their jams of the epoch, but that's only one serious flaw; even so, it's only a miserable seven minutes long, and it has some pretty invigorating solos from Mr Fripp, without any of those pointless stop-and-start pseudo-meditative passages of SABB.
On the other hand, the amount of energy is truly vitalizing, and even if the Larks tunes aren't performed as flawlessly and don't look as polished as on the studio record, this is fully compensated by the 'raw feel' that brings them to life on stage. Now I know I'm talking cliches here, but what the hell am I supposed to do if I can't express it any other way? 'Larks' Tongues In Aspic Part Two' rocks and shakes, with Fripp punching out those power chords with even more anger, force and distortion than in the studio - and I love the way they start the album, with those quiet, relaxative Mellotron sounds coming out of nowhere and then Fripp lashing out with that famous riff with all force. Makes you really jump out of the chair - that is, if you're not used to the overall style of King Crimson. 'Lament' goes down easily, with Wetton's singing more acceptable than on the original; and even the one song I haven't previously been fond of on Larks' Tongues, 'Exiles', reveals some hidden potential that I haven't been aware of either (which makes me appreciate the original even more now). All of a sudden, these violins and singing sound so attractive, so majestic, sad and moving, that I'm really ready to acknowledge this tune as a major masterpiece. Have to warn you, though, that it sounds a bit more messy, with Fripp throwing in more feedback than required... Like it, still.
The second side gives you your long-desired 'Easy Money' and it's good, real good - that's one of the best tunes on Larks' Tongues and it's also better live. A little. But, of course, the highlight is 'Schizoid Man' again: since this song is unarguably the best one in the whole King Crimson repertoire, that just means that, however good the other selections might be, I just can't wait to hear it in the encore section. And they do it just fine - a trifle slowed down, pr'aps, but that's no problem. Wetton has his vocals distorted like in the original which makes them completely undistinguishable from Lake's (notice that the distortion is listenable, unlike the ruining of Burrell vocals on Earthbound), and Fripp rips out a terrifying solo (as usual). Classic and a fitting end to a satisfying live record; and it's also the last time you'll get to hear a live 'Schizoid Man' on a legit King Crimson live album. I'm not even sure if the Belew lineup ever tried this one live - probably not. Then again, I'm not a specialist when it comes down to all the gazillions of live records Fripp is distributing to Crimson diehards through his Discipline label, so you'd better ask an official expert.
Finally, just to make a respectively fitting end to this review, I'd just like to say that the record also shows how much they've improved their live reputation since the early days: just listen to the performing level on Epitaph and compare it to what they're doing here. Fripp might have always been good, but Bruford's drumming is immaculate compared to Giles' weak, feeble work on the early concerts, and Cross was a great support to the band as well. Quite a lot of this improvement is due to technical perfection of their sound equipment, of course (you have to make this adjustment in respect to the 1969 concerts), but this shouldn't conceal the fact that this band is still much more tight and self-assured than all the previous incarnations.
And one more note: since the album is out of print, what you can get more easily (at least, as of the time of writing of this review) is either (a) The Night Watch, reviewed above, or (b) the box-set Great Deceiver, with extracts from about four or more performances by the Wetton-Bruford lineup, that probably includes every song they performed live with that lineup in three or four versions. This could definitely keep you occupied till the end of your life. As for me, my limited financial resources and general snubby attitude towards overpriced unreasonable box-sets prevent me from purchasing Great Deceiver, and I have taken a solemn vow to stay away from the "Discipline-approved" 'rare' KC live records (simply because I don't want to end up with KC albums occupying half of my collection), but I'm perfectly happy with my trusty Night Watch and USA copies, so no need to bother.

Lament over the lack of comments to this review

DISCIPLINE

Year Of Release: 1981
Record rating = 8
Overall rating = 11

The 'new look' King Crimson, with economic elements of New Wave thrown in to add to the old prog sound.
Best song: MATTE KUDASAI

Either Fripp was disappointed by his solo career (for the failure of which nobody but him was to blame), or he just tried to think of something different, but fact is, in the early Eighties he got back Bill Bruford, recruited the promising New Wave singer/guitarist Adrian Belew and bass/'stick' wizard Tony Levin and with this lineup resuscitated King Crimson for the third (fourth? fifth? that's debatable) time. Of course, this sounds nothing like the King Crimson of old: neither the First Version of the band with its orchestral grandeur and lyrical pomposity, nor the Second Version with its hard rock crunch and atonal jamming. Even Fripp's guitar sound has changed radically (only on 'Indiscipline' does he deliver a few jarring guitar lines resembling the energy of old). In the meantime, Bruford has obviously assimilated quite a fair amount of World Music to make his playing sound as ethnic as possible: check the drumming on the title track and on, say, Yes' 'Close To The Edge' and tell me it's the same person. Levin's bass is popping and bopping as never before; in fact, if there's anybody responsible for the 'danceable' elements in the new King Crimson, it's primarily Levin. And, finally, Belew contributes the 'psycho' atmosphere: he's credited for 'elephantosity' on the record. With his bizarre, intriguing guitar parts and totally meaningless, cabbalistic lyrics, unpretentious at the most, he certainly makes sure this is gonna be a totally unpredictable listen.
The songs themselves are mostly good, although none of them are great, and I don't get some critics (like Wilson & Alroy, for instance) who rave about the album to the extent of almost declaring it the finest record of the Eighties. In order to be 'finest', a record should say something, preferably something new, not just display flashy musical techniques. Unfortunately, Discipline refuses to say anything, and in that respect it's one hundred percent King Crimson: bizarre music with little significant content. Music for one's ears, indeed, not for one' soul.
Let's take it as it is, though. As 'music for our ears', this stuff is pretty good. There are a couple groovy instrumentals, like the eight-minute 'Sheltering Sky', very moody and sometimes reminiscent of the Stones' 'Heaven', or the ethnic-sounding 'Discipline' with some catchy, pleasant guitar lines repeated over and over again to create a perfect environment for your eardrums. The 'sung' tracks, however, aren't really different, because the lyrics are few and (like I said) meaningless; moreover, quite often Belew doesn't sing at all, going for rambling, incoherent 'monologues', like on the opening 'Elephant Talk' or the single hard rock tune 'Indiscipline'. Actually, 'Elephant Talk' consists of Belew reciting some entries from a thesaurus on the word 'talk' (while Fripp adds funny 'elephant' noises), while 'Indiscipline' has same Belew reciting extracts from a letter from his wife (while Fripp adds a heavy rhythm track). The best of these, though, are 'Thela Hun Ginjeet' (an anagram for 'Heat In The Jungle') and 'Matte Kudasai' ('Please wait' in Japanese). If anything, these two tracks are the most close to what I'd call a 'song' here, as opposed to 'musical surrealism'.
'Thela Hun Ginjeet' is a great rockin' shuffle built on Bruford's polyrhythms (ooh, what a cool word) and strong singing from Belew. Again, it has an 'ethnic' feel to it, especially in the chorus, but that's not necessarily a bad idea, after all. It has a good, solid melody. And 'Matte Kudasai' is the 'balladeering part' of the album: a slow, heavenly chant, emphasized by Fripp's synth guitars and again pulled off mostly due to Belew's talents as a singer. It's probably the most 'Crimsonian' track on the album, and my favourite. Actually, on careful listening one can find traces of old King Crimson even in the weirdest numbers. If you substitute the mellow guitar tone on 'Discipline' for the hard rock crunch of the 1973-74 King Crimson version, for instance, what you get is pure King Crimson... then again, 'pure' King Crimson never possessed that kind of brilliant guitar interplay that we witness in the title track.
Still, do not rush out and buy this album. You have to get a serious taste for emotionless, technically flawless and grotesque music in order to appreciate it. Me, I haven't got one, so I'm still a little bit puzzled about this kind of music. Sure, this isn't your generic blues tunes or three-chord rock'n'roll; but I've heard quite a lot of stuff that ain't generic blues or rock'n'roll and is a thousand times more entertaining. It's interesting to hear this album a couple of times, just so that you could say: 'Yea... really!' But the purpose of this music is kinda unclear to me. The 'ethnic' element is totally fake - they don't really go for replicating ethnic music, and even if they did, that would be fake too. The lyrics are pointless, ony serving to emphasize their unimportance. So they just mostly go for a half-extraordinary, half-ridiculous atmosphere, and it all depends on your tastes. I give the record an 8 because I objectively feel it deserves it, and there's nothing about this kind of music that's offensive or even unpleasant, but... hmmm... guess I'm just not a crazyass fan of post-modernistic jokes.

Discipline! Mail your ideas, everybody!

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Rich Bunnell <[email protected]> (05.03.2000)

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BEAT

Year Of Release: 1982
Record rating = 7
Overall rating = 10

They don't sound like they're in for grandiose diversity, now don't they?
Best song: HEARTBEAT

More of the same, just a little worse. Actually, just a little better, too. There's a little more songs (actually, one more), and they're generally shorter: even the instrumental jams don't sound like they were destined to go on forever. Also, some of the selections finally demonstrate the presence of some aim - I mean, not all of this record sounds as if it were made by four groovy hip dudes who decided to get weird in the studio with little else on their minds. Some of the songs are intricate, extraordinary love ballads; some are devoted to description of social psychosis, and some are, well, just pure avantgarde. In fact, critics will certainly disagree, but I feel like Discipline was really a 'rehearsing' record, a testing of water. Now that the water has been found warm enough, Beat is somewhat more mature. Sadly, the melodies aren't that strong and (goes without saying) that original.
In fact, the starting track, 'Neal And Jack And Me', picks up right there where we were left with 'Discipline'. I have both records on one CD and I practically don't notice the break between the two songs: both are built on that esoteric Fripp/Belew interplay that some find entrancing and some consider egotistic. Me, I like it, but building two different songs on exactly the same rhythm pattern doesn't say a lot about creativity.
The highlight of Beat are two Belew ballads: 'Heartbeat' is a pretty New Wave-ish one, which means it's 'beaty' and danceable, but never banal. And 'Two Hands' might sound a wee bit sentimental for King Crimson, but the song's complicated structure redeems it. Also, 'Neurotica' is kinda trippy, with its mesh of city noises, mad guitar rhythms and Belew's paranoid narrative. They're all involving, in other words. Plus, 'Sartori In Tangier' is a classy instrumental. However, the rest is just infatuatingly boring, especially the closing 'Requiem' that sounds like anything but a requiem. Rather it reminds me of Crimson's worst early excesses like 'Fracture' or even 'Moonchild': a six-minute lengthy, stupid jam where they seem to try everything at once and nothing actually happens. 'Howler' and 'Waiting Man' are little better: they might be a little more structured, but essentially they're just the same pointless jams with Belew stumbling over improvised, erratic lyrics.
Since I really wouldn't know how to analyse this kind of product further, let me just sum up: approximately half of this album is an improvement over Discipline since it has an evident edge that was totally missing earlier, and approximately half of it is worse since it is the same Discipline motives without any kind of progression. Anybody who's wild about Discipline should get this, and even if you happen to get this before Discipline it ain't no crime. Question is: what is a crime? Is recording a song like 'Requiem' a crime, for instance?
I vote 'Yes' and give the album a 7. King Crimson, be warned in the future!

Waiting man! Don't wait to mail your ideas!

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Ben Greenstein <[email protected]> (15.12.2000)

THREE OF A PERFECT PAIR

Year Of Release: 1984
Record rating = 8
Overall rating = 11

More overtly 'pop' with good effect: it seems that both Belew and Fripp are better represented on this one.
Best song: THREE OF A PERFECT PAIR

Oh yeah! They took my advice! This album, the last of the famous 'triad', doesn't actually sound different enough from both Beat and Discipline. But, taken in general, the songs are better constructed, more memorable and with a certain gritty edge that Beat in particular seemed to lack. This one also marks a change in album composure principles: the first side is mostly donated to Belew who continues to develop his songwriting skills, while the second side is mostly devoted to Frippertronics and alternate style instrumental jams. Whether this is good or bad for easy listening, that's not up to me to decide; personally I don't mind (although burying a perfect short pop number like 'Dig Me' in between two lengthy, noodling instrumental suites doesn't seem a particularly good idea to me). What's obvious is that by this time Belew's and Fripp's style were starting to become practically incompatible. Discipline shows that both of them initially started out from the same platform - love for new technologies and weird, half-crazy New Wave instrumental pop sound. However, Belew had slowly metamorphosed into a more 'conventional' rock/pop singer and composer, veering towards traditionalistic song structures and attractive, tasteful melodies, while Fripp was growing more and more nostalgic towards his past, especially the hard rock sound of the Bruford/Wetton line-up. This explains why the two sides of this album sound so different, you'd never guess they belonged to the same record. Needless to say, the band fell apart shortly after the TOAPP tour, and it took ten years more before Fripp and Belew would reconvene again...
Nevertheless, let's get back to the songs. The Belew side is pretty much all great. It starts with the ominous title track, featuring the most rich vocal harmonies on the choruses that Adrian had ever mastered before that, and the song is truly emotionally resonant, even if the lyrics are meaningless (it's probably supposed to be a love song, but the lyrics don't really make more sense than the title). The only thing that gets on my nerves sometimes is that the melody is once again built on the same guitar interplay that we already had on 'Discipline' and 'Neal And Jack And Me'. Still, the vocals overshadow the melody here, and it's fairly impressive. 'Model Man' isn't as good, but once again, Belew's singing is terrific - besides developing his musical taste, he's obviously developped his singing abilities as well. The lengthy 'Sleepless' is mostly memorable for the groovy bassline (Tony Levin is king!); if not for the base on here, it would be forgettable. And finally, 'Man With An Open Heart' is the closest to Eighties pop they ever got - the song might just as well be recorded by Genesis, but it wasn't. Instead, it gave us the opportunity to enjoy some more cool guitar lines and smooth singing; this bouncy ditty is the catchiest on the record, and although prog fans will probably twirl their noses, me the 'good music' lover welcomes it with open embrace.
The second side is patchy, though - anyway, you might have predicted this opinion of mine cuz it was obvious from the previous reviews that I'm not the biggest fan of Fripp jams. Indeed, two of the tracks on here rank right there with 'Fracture' and 'Moonchild' again. 'Industry' is a seven-minute noisefest that's based on a booming march rhythm re-borrowed from 'The Devil's Triangle' (which, in its turn, was stolen from 'Mars'), and, frankly speaking, who needs a New Wavish re-write of 'Mars' and what for? And 'No Warning' is just a mess with no particular aim as well (at least that one is short). But - this time the lottery ain't so unlucky: 'Nuages' is cool and moody, with beautiful Mellotron passages and Fripp using that groovy guitar tone that he first experienced on 'Epitaph'. The song certainly matches its title and, well, you could put it on a cloudy day, get into a chair and relax and fell all good and a little sad, but everybody needs to get a little sadness now and then, eh? Whatever... And the closing 'Larks' Tongues In Aspic Part III' is indeed so: it sounds like a modernistic update on 'Larks' Tongues In Aspic Part II', with Robert even using a similar guitar riff in the beginning. Not that it's very heavy, but it is certainly one of the few tracks in the whole 1981-84 catalogue where Fripp allows himself a little bit more distortion than usual ('Indiscipline' is the other one). To this you should add the little 'Dig Me', the great 'lost' tune that I already mentioned, with one of the few interesting lyrical concepts of this mark of the band: it is depicting the laments of an old automobile lying in a heap of rubbish and complaining about his fortune. Again, great singing job from Belew on the choruses (the verses are spoken, in his old manner). And hoopla, you got yourself a near perfect album - if it weren't for Fripp overdoing the job... Still, I must insist that the better numbers on here overshadow almost everything on Discipline; only it's less consistent, so both get the same rating.
Like I said, the band dissolved soon afterwards, to reconvene only in 1994 to form the next incarnation of King Crimson. But they did play several concerts in 1984, and my next review will be dedicated to one of them. Not that you'd care...

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Ben Greenstein <[email protected]> (15.12.2000)

ABSENT LOVERS

Year Of Release: 1998
Record rating = 10
Overall rating = 13

A fantastic live record. You won't believe me until you hear it, of course.
Best song: it's like, ya know, trying to find the perfect angel...

WOW! Who'd ever had thought Fripp had such great stuff lying in the vaults for almost fifteen years - and sure enough, it would be hard to believe this fact because recently he's begun to throw out one archive release after another, multiplying them like cockroaches. However, amidst all this stuff like The Great Deceiver (a hyper-expensive boxset), Epitaph (which is good, like I already said, but hardly overshadows In The Court) and hundreds of special DGM offers, don't miss the modest 2-CD Absent Lovers set. Recorded in Montreal, at the final show of the 1984 tour (and therefore, the last concert by KC's Second Movement), it's absolutely phenomenal. Now I may have my complaints against some parts of the previous studio albums as boring, atonal or just uninspired, but I virtually have nothing at all against anything on here, apart from a couple minor problems. The band sounds like a furious, bombastic monster: they rip into the numbers with such force, zeal and, okay, taste, that I really have nothing left to do but to be left speechless and motionless for one hundred minutes.
No, don't expect any surprises in the track listing. Apparently Belew was not quite suited to singing older King Crimson material (or maybe it was Fripp that took the word 'progressive' in its radical meaning and was trying to get rid of the older stuff), so there are only two numbers from the 'past' - the instrumentals 'Larks' Tongues In Aspic, Part II' and 'Red'. The rest is all comprised of stuff from the last three studio releases. But what a selection! As if they managed to predict my taste, they intentionally underrepresent Beat (playing just 'Heartbeat', 'Sartori In Tangier' and 'Waiting Man', which are all right by me; no stupid 'Requiem' or 'Howler'! Youpee!), concentrating instead on Discipline and TOAPP. All the complaints about filler material are gone: they either omit it or make even the original filler sound interesting - 'Waiting Man', for instance, which I never seemed to notice on Beat, gets a ferocious 'rainy/fiery' guitar solo, and 'Industry', one of the most disturbing instrumentals on TOAPP, is fully compensated by Bruford's top peak energy and the inspiring, brilliant guitar interplay.
There are a couple of things that kinda irritate me, like the opening instrumental 'Entry Of The Crims', a typical KC atonal mess of feedback and stuff; it probably made a good concert opening, but on record it just sounds like the band tuning up for six minutes (which they probably were). I'd certainly prefer to hear 'Nuages' or 'The Sheltering Sky' instead, but that's me, and no stupid six-minute intro is going to prevent the adrenaline level from rising at the frantic, raving beat of 'Larks' Tongues In Aspic, Part III' which then without a break transforms itself into an even more frantic and raving version of 'Thela Hun Ginjeet' that rips the original to shreds and spits it somewhere off in the distance. Then... oh, but do I really need to go into details over this album? I mean, I was so sceptical about the studio material because it sounded kinda fake to me - you know, guys being weird in the studio and wanting us to appreciate their weirdness for no particular reason. In the live context it all somehow manages to come to life - maybe the 'live' vibe does have some meaning, after all. To sum up: this is a must have for those who, like me, are pleased by this version of the band but twirl their noses at the Fripperfiller. The level of energy is incredible, and the technical ability of these guys is beyond all praises (can you really believe that all these complicated riffs of 'Discipline', twisted drum-machiney sounds of 'Industry' and super-speedy, funky basslines of 'Sleepless' are played live, without overdubs? Well, that's what Fripp tells us, at least). For those who love our Crimson hard and rockin', there's the oldie 'Larks' Tongues In Aspic, Part II' with Fripp churning out his 'pa-dam-pa-pam-pam-pa-pa-dam' riffs as if he were still young (no offense, Bob); for those who love it weird there's the clumsy (in the good sense), bizarre 'Elephant Talk'; for those who love it nice and gentle, there's the beautiful 'Matte Kudasai'; and for those who love it modern and poppy, there's the groovy Genesis-style 'Man With An Open Heart'. And finally, for those of you who have a PC (and a PC thou dost have, for else how would ye be a-readin' through this review?), there's a surprise on disc 1! What are you waiting for? Grab this now before it's out of print and you have to fill in a form for Fripp's DGM in order for it to be sent to you!

Man with an open heart! Mail your ideas!

Your worthy comments:

Ben Greenstein <[email protected]> (15.12.2000)

VROOOM

Year Of Release: 1994
Record rating = 5
Overall rating = 8

Too small, too insecure, too dull, although it is King Crimson.
Best song: SEX SLEEP EAT DRINK DREAM

Don't know 'bout everybody else, but this 'third movement' of King Crimson just doesn't thrill me as much as the previous ones. For some unclear reasons, this brief reincarnation period of 1994-96 adds two more players - Trey Gunn on stick (did they really have Levin to play bass and Gunn play stick at once?) and Pat Mastelotto on percussion (doubling Bruford?) This 'double trio''s main intent was to recapture as many sides of King Crimson as possible, the primary goal being a wish to combine the hard-rockin' mid-Seventies King Crimson of Red with the 'heavenly' New Wave King Crimson of Three Of A Perfect Pair. Add to this Belew's maturation as a skilful pop songwriter, and one could only imagine what kind of crushing, mind-blowing result they could have reached.
Unfortunately, no. While the band itself probably considered this little EP so successful that it pushed them on towards recording a full-fledged album that came out next year, I myself can only consider it a 'so-so' effort. It isn't exactly short (after all, thirty minutes of music was quite well for a solid LP in the Sixties, so this is anything but a single's worth of material), but, short or not so short, it just doesn't have enough good material. Actually, there is one beautiful ballad, the sad, soulful 'One Time' with Belew successfully pulling off a McCartney, and one good rocker - the riffy, driving 'Sex Sleep Eat Drink Dream', where Fripp again demonstrates what it is to be a real guitarmaster. And have you heard that Belew scream in the middle? Beats the stuffing out of Robert Plant any day of my life!
Apart from that, though, the EP is totally unsatisfying. The title track is just too twisted for my tastes - it does have enough rocking power not to make me fall asleep, but it starts nowhere and goes in the same place. It doesn't even have a memorable riff, and overall sounds like a multiinstrument band take on 'Red'. 'THRAK' is more of the same, while on 'When I Say Stop Continue' and 'Cage' they fall back into the trappings of dissonance. They rock all right, and Bruford bashes and thrashes all over the place as usual, and sure enough I cannot accuse them of anything concrete, but they just sound aimless. They're not even fast, like on 'Larks' Tongues In Aspic Part III'! And they're not funny. And, finally, they're not innovative. Yes, maybe that's it. Maybe that's what makes me feel so bored with this record. They don't present me with any new ideas. And where's that cool guitar tone and interplay that they experienced with on 'Discipline', 'Three Of A Perfect Pair' and stuff? Nah. Decent to the level of me wanting to look ahead and review the big follow-up, but not entertaining enough to make me return to it.

When I say stop, continue mailing your ideas

THRAK

Year Of Release: 1995
Record rating = 6
Overall rating = 9

More of the same, but there are more songs, and this makes for a more diverse listen.
Best song: WALKING ON AIR

The 'big' follow-up to VROOOM, this, again oddly titled, album includes most of the tunes from the single (except the forgettable 'When I Say Stop' and 'Cage') and adds about twenty/thirty minutes worth of new ones. Since I already said all I wanted to say about the old ones, let's discuss the new ones.
Actually, there isn't much to discuss, because the 'new' ones are mostly in the same vein: beautiful ballads, solid, but not particularly innovative rockers, and ultra professional, but extremely dull jams. The jams this time, besides the title track and 'VROOOM', include 'B'Boom' and 'VROOOM VROOOM', the most groovy thing about which is still their title. Golly, do you think they spent most of their free times reading comic strips? Anyway, no matter how much time I spend listening to this stuff, it still escapes me like a moth from the palm of my hand. Worst thing is, they're all so similar that I don't even notice when, for instance, 'B'Boom' suddenly turns into 'THRAK' (as if somebody cares in any case). All I distantly remember is that 'B'Boom' incorporates a not especially original drum solo - and I thought Bruford thought enough of himself so as not to engage in such unworthy actions.
Now the ballads are an entirely different matter - Belew is king indeed. Apart from the already mentioned 'One Time', he gets to perform what is arguably the best track on here, the moody, gorgeous 'Walking On Air'; this time it has the atmosphere of a solid George Harrison number, and so much the better, because there's pretty few things in this world that can surpass the beauty of a solid George Harrison number. And it's not just the calm, soothing melody and Adrian's wonderful singing, it's almost everything about the song that's beautiful, ending with Levin's 'mystical' bass lines. There are also a couple of minor efforts here that are not as memorable, but still please the regular ear ('Inner Garden I', 'Inner Garden II').
And the rockers are interesting, well, some of them, at least. Actually, one of them - the dreary 'Dinosaur' with real dinosaur noises (ha!) and Belew's soulful wailing about him being a dinosaur and somebody digging up his bones. Gee, wouldn't that be meaning they were ironizing about the band's resurrection in a new epoch? Could well be, but, anyway, whatever the lyrics, the song is good. Or maybe it is good because of the lyrics, and if only they'd bothered to set some of their jams to lyrics as well, I'd be of a somewhat higher opinion about the album. Or maybe it isn't. Because the other rocker, 'People', a little in the Police/Sting style, simply doesn't cut the mustard for me - they sound so strained, and there's so little real energy, that it's just sour. And as for its final section with its repetitive 'majestic', sad riff, it reminds me of a pale copy of the Beatles' 'I Want You', but it also seems that the band almost sleeps through the entire peace.
In any case - the resurrection of the band seems like a crazy thing to me. Previously, each time Fripp took a decision to revitalize King Crimson, he'd wait until he received some new fascinating ideas (or at least recruited some new people with new fascinating ideas), so that every new debut album broke some new ground. In The Court broke a lot of new ground, and Larks' Tongues In Aspic ushered in a new conception of instrumental rock music, and Discipline also struck us with a virtually new, 'Progressive New Wave' sound. But THRAK has nothing of the kind - no new ideas or anything. Adrian could have easily put the best songs on a solo album, because Fripp and Bruford's presence on the album is just plain unnecessary. Everything truly 'Crimsonian' about the record is either dated or boring. Maybe you understand the purpose of this album? It isn't even a cash-in - it couldn't have been one, as there aren't that much King Crimson fans in the world nowadays. Still, the ballads are good, and the record is well worth owning at least for the songs I mentioned. Cheap, of course, but that goes without saying. And please someone tell Fripp for me to dig and retrieve a couple more amusing sonic effects - he's too darn repetitive on here.

People! Where are your ideas?

Your worthy comments:

Ben Greenstein <[email protected]> (15.12.2000)

B'BOOM

Year Of Release: 1995
Record rating = 8
Overall rating = 11

Another good live album, but with few surprises this time.
Best song: LARKS' TONGUES IN ASPIC PART II

Subtitled 'The Official Bootleg - Live in Argentina', this 2-CD release (not archive this time) again shows us that King Crimson are first of all a superb live band than anything else. Practically every new composition of theirs is superior to the studio releases - Bruford's percussion is sharper, Fripp's guitar more energetic, and Belew's singing more aggressive and distinctive than on THRAK. You can't help but wonder if they really used the studio exclusively as a polygon for their live shows, and the studio album as a pretext for touring.
Indeed, while I felt almost no interest towards their new instrumental approach on THRAK, the live versions of 'VROOOM', 'B'Boom' and 'THRAK' on this record come across as nearly revelative - it isn't that you just got to admire the technical efficiency of these guys, it really gets you going! Maybe if they speeded them up a bit, it would be even better, but even in slow tempo the songs still deliver a lot of crunch. And 'Sex Sleep Eat Drink Dream' never sounded that good. The only thing that bugs me a little is why they had to include two versions of 'THRAK' and a reprise of 'B'Boom' instead of playing a couple classics. By the way, does anybody know if the new KC line-up ever played 'Schizoid Man' live, and if so, why hadn't they still released a version? Just curious...
Anyway, the older 'classics' (that is, songs from the 1981-84 period) assume a slightly different air on here, possibly because of the two extra players. They sound more complex and a little bit too 'technical' for my ears, although that's still a minor complaint: 'Matte Kudasai' is as gorgeous as ever, 'Heartbeat' is as rhythmic as ever, 'Sleepless' is as bass-stunning as ever, and 'Elephant Talk' is as elephantine as ever (although Fripp uses some other kind of gadget nowadays which doesn't resemble an elephant's bellowing as faithfully).
Finally, just to satisfy everybody there's still a 'blast from the past' - 'Red' again, and 'Larks' Tongues In Aspic Part II' are preceded by 'The Talking Drum' - not the best selection you could imagine, but a jolly good reminder of the past anyway. And as for 'Larks' Tongues', this here is the definite live version of the classic, with Fripp punching out the intoxicating, distorted chords of the main riff as if his very life depended on the strength he was putting into the effort.
What else can be said? Nothing, really, except that, once again, if you're interested in this period of KC, this live album should be your buy and not the seriously flawed THRAK. I still don't like it nearly as much as Absent Lovers just because it's a little bit too heavy in the aimless jam department, what with those two reprises of 'THRAK' and all, but even the jams are enjoyable just because they're so, well, 'hardcore' should I say? Possibly.
Oh! The only thing that really strikes me is the titles they've been giving their albums. Just look at the latest discography - VROOOM! THRAK! B'Boom! Doesn't it make you feel afraid somebody will mistake it for schizophrenic ravings?

PEOPLE! Where ARE your ideas?

THRAKATTAK

Year Of Release: 1996
Record rating = 1
Overall rating = 4

Another live album. Quite a lot of surprises, but these are the kind of surprises that make you rush to the used bins back again.
Best song: THRAK

The closest analogy I could have thought of so far to this album is George Harrison's Electronic Sound (the one where he fools around with his newly acquired synth for about fourty minutes or so). This is another live album (although I don't quite understand if it's live in the studio or live at a concert; in the latter case I pity the audiences indeed), but this time the only 'song' material is a version of 'THRAK' split in two parts, one of which begins the album and the other of which closes it. The version itself is good, and even if their instrumental compositions of the epoch are not among my favourites, it does sound impressive in the company of the other stuff. It rocks!
However, the rest of the album (and it's more than fourty minutes long) is all devoted to one lengthy improvised piece (okay, it does have six different 'parts' which all have separate headings like 'Mother Hold The Candle Steady While I Shave The Chicken's Lip' and 'Fearless And Highly THRaKKed', but essentially this doesn't mean anything except that you'll be able to move the CD laser head to any part of the improvisation you like), and the word 'horrible' is too shallow, too short and too innocent to describe my feelings. Maybe a couple braindead Crimson devotees will appreciate this bunch of noise-making; indeed, I know of a review site whose owner gave the album a five stars just because he felt it was great, although its greatness escaped him at the moment. Obviously, he thought that if Fripp and company thought enough of this jam session to release it on an official CD, it should have been great - whether anybody liked it or not. To me, though, it just proves that Fripp and company have gone so berserk that they thought they could get away with anything by the time, even such a monster.
Essentially, what you get is a mess of the usual atonal, dissonant jams in the fine tradition of 'Fracture' and 'No Warning'. However, this time there is nothing to save you and to distract your attention: the pieces go on and on, and there is no way to escape from the wailing feedback, dissonant piano lines, stick noodlings and drum barrages - other than turning your CD off. Which I finally did - pardon me, but I refuse to listen to this tripe more than once. Anybody who thinks this album is great: your comments are welcome! Teach me something I'm not aware of! In the meantime, if you happen to be a millionaire, you're welcome to raid the world's CD stores and burn every copy of the album in existence. Sad, isn't it? To start King Crimson's career with a best album and top it off with a worst? Let's just hope the guys will reform one more time and come up with something truly creative and more sense-making.

Fearless and highly THRaKKed King Crimson lovers! Why don't you defend this album?

Your worthy comments:

John McFerrin <[email protected]> (17.06.2000)

VIDEOS
THREE OF A PERFECT PAIR

An excellent video of the KC 1984 tour, filmed in Tokyo. It's just your average concert captured on tape, but ultimately that's what makes the video so enjoyable: apart from a stupid special-effect-loaded opening 'Three Of A Perfect Pair', all the rest is just live performances, solidly filmed and quite visible, and this means that you'll be returning back to this video again and again. The band is outstanding in action, especially the contrast between the dancing, 'slightly mad' Belew and the quiet Fripp sitting in his well-polished suit and spectacles and playing phenomenal guitar lines. Sometimes Belew's conduct seems slightly excessive, and the outfit he's wearing is kinda ridiculous (but that's just me clothing tastes), but one gets used to that. And have you ever seen the 'stick'? Well it's here, as well as everything else. If you ever wondered how on earth the Crimsons play their instruments with such a wide range of sound and effects, here's, like, the answer to all your questions. And they only use a synth on the opening track (courtesy of Levin, who otherwise mostly sticks to sticks (ha!) and bass).
The track selection is predictable, of course (almost coinciding with Absent Lovers, although there's no 'Red' and 'Discipline', while 'Entry Of The Crims' is replaced by 'No Warning'), and the level of performing is a little bit lower than on that classic release - it seems that Belew is often busy posing before the cameras instead of playing, while on AL he was concentrated on his playing as it was being recorded on audiotape. So a couple of tracks don't sound as good on here as they can ('The Waiting Man', for instance, hardly does anything for me in the video version). But that's just minor quibbles - like I said, watching the band in action is an incredible experience, much more heart-warming than having to see Yes, for instance, or the Moody Blues. Go get the video if you can, it'll be worth your money. And hey! Bill Bruford is wearing 'the same suit that brought you Larks' Tongues In Aspic'! Now that's what I call 'traditionalism'!

Mail your ideas

APPENDIX: SOLO PROJECTS

There are about a million and one solo projects by various King Crimson members, past, present and possibly future ones, and I have not the least intent of reviewing even a tenth part of these. As of now, I only have two records directly related to the KC moniker, one of which is a historical necessity for every Crimson fan and the other one an unjustly forgotten minor gem. I guess that some of Robert Fripp's stuff might also be hugely recommendable.
A separate topic is the solo career of Adrian Belew - the guy obviously went far beyond the style of Eighties' King Crimson and might even deserve a special, solo page in the future. Right now I'm placing him at the very end of the page, breaking the normal alphabetic order of artists in the appendices; this is certainly not denigrating, it's just to point out that Adrian is truly a special fellow.

THE CHEERFUL INSANITY OF GILES, GILES & FRIPP
(released by GILES, GILES & FRIPP)

Year Of Release: 1968
Overall rating = 11

Lightweight jazz pop. Funny thing is, this sounds like the Kinks more than King Crimson.
Best song: ONE IN A MILLION

This is the only existent album of the infamous trio, and I thought I'd better review it on the King Crimson page. Not because it sounds like a natural predecessor of King Crimson (it doesn't), but just because I don't want to make a separate page called 'Giles, Giles & Fripp'. Now sue me if you think I'm inconsistent.
The track listing here is endless, but it's mostly because the songs are usually separated by short Monty Python-esque gags, all united under the names 'The Saga Of Rodney Toady' (written by Fripp) and 'Just George' (written by M. Giles). While 'Rodney Toady' is a hilarious story about a fat guy who was never loved by anybody because he was so fat and ugly, told by Fripp in a strange, asthmatic tone, I can't say the same of the stupid 'Just George' ('I know a man, and his name is George'). For me, it only sounds out of place and clutters the track listing.
The songs, however, rule - at least, a large part of them. To tell you the truth, this sounds nothing like the King Crimson we've all grown to know: the 'strumentation is scarce, the guitar is not very prominent and rather quiet, and they mostly stick to very simple, lightweight pop, folk or jazz arrangements. Just a couple of tracks contain atonal jamming bits a la later Crimson records ('The Crukster' - but it's only one and a half minutes long!), and on a couple songs the jazz schtick sticks out so much it can't but bring memories of some of King Crimson's saxophone-driven instrumentals, like the groovy 'Elephant Song' with its powerful brass riff.
When I first heard the album, I thought I was going to hate it or at least get rid of it as soon as possible as of nothing but a peculiar historical curiosity, but more listens bring out the fun and the grooviness. The atmosphere is engaging and friendly, no desperate pessimism or world sorrow anywhere. For starters, you get your average pleasant balladeering ('Newly-Weds', with a complex time signature that shifts from moody waltzing to a pseudo-boogie style; the stately, melancholic 'North Meadow'; the somewhat draggy, but atmospheric organ-based 'Call Tomorrow'), your great pleasant balladeering ('Thursday Morning' which is often criticized for its Moody Bluesishness, but that's alright by me, the song has a fantastic melody, and I don't even mind the amateur orchestration; and what do those people hold against the Moody Blues, anyway?), and lots of other cookies. What cookies, might you inquire? Well, what can you expect out of a record like this? I mean - three young Englishmen that decided to make a record that should be at once artsy, diverse, unpretentious and funny? Now it might sound amusing, but the record belongs to a really rare category in rock music (if it is rock music, that is; but then again, if it isn't, then what is it?) It is certainly art rock, but it ain't serious in the least: a prog basher paradise! Tell me what you think of the wonderful 'One In A Million', for instance, a tricky little social commentary that is very much akin to the Kinks, both lyricswise and melodywise; its charming, gentle pop structure with the cute little flute twirls is simply enthralling.
The most amazing thing is that there's hardly any attempts to sound 'psychedelic' anywhere on this record - I don't really count such minor details as the tripped out vocals on the ultra-catchy 'How Do They Know'. And, of course, just like in the case of concurrent Kinks records of the same epoch, that's precisely the reason why such a tasteful record was a complete commercial bomb. There's a lot of weirdness on here, sure, but nary a drug or 'kozmic' reference to be found. Frank Zappa would have dug these guys, I suppose...
Fripp breaks through with just a couple of compositions. He really was never much of a composer, and his few attempts at pop on this album hardly have any interesting hooks, although it's interesting that 'Little Children' demonstrates his very early passion for the Mellotron. So the most significant of these is the lengthy 'Suite No. 1' that begins as a cool jazz improv and then suddenly transforms into that classical Mellotron-drenched whopper; the finger-flashing guitarwork in the first part is simply outstanding, showing us that Fripp was a guitar genius from the very start. But the main songwriters are the Giles brothers, out of whom Michael turns out to be the more gifted one: besides the already mentioned 'Elephant Song', 'Thursday Morning' and 'One In A Million', he contributes a ridiculous Twenties' music hall operetta-style love song ('The Sun Is Shining') which is so kitsch it makes me wanna drop to the floor and laugh my belly off, and the mystical 'How Do They Know' - all prime songs, even though all also relative throwaways. If it wasn't for 'Just George', almost every song of his on here would be a gem. Anyway, it's good that it was him, not Peter, that stayed on for the 'main' King Crimson. And he's a good drummer!
The newly reissued CD which I happen to own also adds six bonus tracks, four of which are just alternate versions (single or mono versions), but two of which are crucial for the understanding of the development of the King Crimson sound - they both feature the added forces of Ian McDonald, with the sound enrichened by saxes and other brass tricks. Fripp's 'Under The Sky' is a rather forgettable ballad, but Peter Giles' 'She Is Loaded' is a classic, with my favourite lyrical line on the whole record ('her kisses never get better/they only get wetter and wetter'). It makes me so confused every time I hear it... For some strange reason, the song also reminds me of Queen. Something from Sheer Heart Attack, you know. That kind of groove.

Call tomorrow and mail your ideas

McDONALD AND GILES
(released by McDONALD AND GILES)

Year Of Release: 1971
Overall rating = 11

A cheerful, ear-pleasant, utterly nice listen that shows which direction King Crimson might have taken IF...
Best song: FLIGHT OF THE IBIS

This ain't a King Crimson album, but wouldn't I feel stupid if I had to make a special page entitled 'McDonald And Giles' dedicated to the review of one album called McDonald And Giles? And anyway, McDonald and Giles is exactly half of the original King Crimson, being no lesser 'founding fathers' of the band than Fripp himself. Why should this odd incarnation be denied the right to be reviewed on the main King Crimson page? What's in a name, anyway?..
Well, in this case, it does have quite a lot in it, of course. The album, recorded by Ian McDonald and Michael Giles with the help of our old friend Peter Giles, sounds nothing like In The Court. More exactly, it is a return to the friendly, cheerful and slightly crazy atmosphere of Cheerful Insanity, but on a different level: this one's a real "art rock" record with obvious "progressive" elements, particularly on the longish tracks. Which means that the songs are generally longer, the lyrics are generally more complicated and the instrumentation techniques are much more sophisticated. Most entertainment is still provided by McDonald's Mellotron and saxes; however, Michael's drumming has never been better, and they exploit a handful of guests like Stevie Winwood and others, so you won't complain about the thinness of sound. What's even more interesting is that the album doesn't have a pretentious feel about it despite being dominated by two lengthy, multi-part symhonic suites. Indeed, it almost sounds inviting, and if it weren't for the fact that quite a large bit of it still sounds deadly boring to me, I'd easily call this the best 'King Crimson' album since In The Court and forever. Anyway, don't forget that it wasn't Fripp that was responsible for the band's songwriting in the first place, but McDonald in person. The problems actually started exactly when Fripp took over some of the songwriting duties, but I think I already gave a hint at that in the Lizard review...
There are just five titles on the album, but that's no serious problem because even the lengthy suites all have something to redeem them (and they're all multi-part and far more varied within their own limits than, say, a particularly monotonous Yes epic). My personal favourite, though, is the beautiful, warm and gentle ballad 'Flight Of The Ibis' that's said in the liner notes to be the original melody for 'Cadence And Cascade'. May well be, but then I don't understand why did they have to change that melody because 'Flight' is much better and more moving. There's another pretty lil' acoustic ditty here in the same vein, called 'Is She Waiting?', but it's less memorable.
The lengthier compositions include Michael Giles' 'Tomorrow's People' that starts out fine but then degenerates into a boring jam, and the eleven-minute 'Suite In C' that's much better - the main theme is a cool jazz number, and if you have enough patience to sit through another boring Steve Winwood-dominated jam, it ends in some funny bits of boogie-woogie playing. None of this is offensive, and some is simply great. Same goes for the controversial suite 'Birdman' that occupies all of the second side. On the lyrical/conceptual side, it's an 'inspiring' story about a crazyass inventor that dreamed of flying so much he finished building some crazyass wings machine and happily set off the ground in the sunset. Kinda like the Daedalus/Icarus story on a modern level, only without the pathetically tragic ending. On the musical side, it has moments of artsy greatness, and the sung parts are all enjoyable. Also, I'd like to mention that this is one of the best "multi-climax" tracks I've ever heard - these guys masterfully build up the tension in many of the parts, particularly with the gorgeous crescendo in the stately, awe-inspiring final part ("Birdman Reflection"), where the gradual addition of piano, low vocal harmonies, high vocal harmonies, drums, bass, organ, guitar and strings, makes up for a truly timeless listening experience.
Unfortunately, it's obvious that since these guys couldn't make an eleven-minute song deserve its length, what can be said about a twenty-minute long epic? Your attention won't be gripped tight throughout, that's for sure. Pity that Robert didn't lend 'em a hand: at times, the lack of his guitar sound is particularly felt. Still, if you only go for the atmosphere, 'Birdman' is just as impressive an epic as most. Tons better than Van Der Graaf Generator's Pawn Hearts, that's for sure.
Nevertheless I'm happy to give this album an eight for one particular reason: this is probably the only bombastic conceptual album in art rock that manages to completely stay away from the dark, disturbing sides of human nature. Basically, what it does is say to me: it's a lie that you have to be 'afraid' or 'shocked' or 'terrified' while listening to impressive prog rock. You can just engage in innocent, philanthropic fun that's both lightweight and solid at the time. It's a pity that the record buying public didn't realize this simplest of truisms back in 1971, as the album flopped badly and was forgotten immediately. In fact, I doubt if you'll be able to find it at all other than in the land of the rising sun (why do the Nipps have everything and the Yankees only have selective things? Are Japanese record companies less greedy and more album-collector-compatible than American ones? Boo! At least the copyright-mocking Russian pirates know something about good records!)

Tomorrow's people will certainly mail their ideas to me

DESIRE CAUGHT BY THE TAIL
(released by ADRIAN BELEW)

Year Of Release: 1986
Overall rating = 7

He's a guitar master, all right, but I sure wish he'd come up with real melodies instead of just freaking out.
Best song: LAUGHING MAN

Not exactly 'big shit', even if I did give the record a seven: I don't hate it, and I only find, well, maybe a couple of tunes on here particularly offensive. Moreover, Adrian's photo on the back cover alone is worth the price of acquisition: he's got all his hair firmly in place, some of it even sticking out, and that's a blessing (hey, I always have trouble looking at his bald spots). But, after all, hair is one thing, and music is another: the major problem is that Adrian Belew with all his talents just isn't the omni-potent super-crafter he so obviously thinks himself to be, and he's far better at creating New Wave-style pop ditties than this kind of stuff. Desire Caught By The Tail is a completely instrumental album, with hardly any vocals to be found, and it is probably deemed as an 'experimental' record - just Belew and his guitar and drum machines, that's all. Everything he actually does is demonstrate the possibilities of his beloved instrument (a thing he'd return to a decade later with the even less critically successful Guitar As Orchestra), running it through dozens of fuzz boxes, synths and various gadgets to quite an amusing range of effects. Amusing, but pointless: sometimes you feel as if you were just finding yourself in the midst of a 'presentation', where Adrian displays the latest sound technologies. Thus, it might be interesting to give this one listen, but it has no artistic value whatsoever.
To make matters worse, Belew doesn't even care about structuring the songs or creating anything closely resembling a melody. In general, Desire reminds me of some particularly wild Zappa freakout: sometimes amusing, but mostly excessive and dull. The album opener, 'Tango Zebra', is quite exemplary in that respect: seven and a half minutes of various tones and effects, ranging from simple acoustic to 'guitar brass', 'guitar violin' and even 'guitar sitar' (!), I think. The notable Eastern overtones don't save the tune, because even when Adrian manages to have a solid groove going, like at the very beginning of the tune, he quickly skips over it and proceeds to bug you with more incoherency.
Thankfully, it is immediately followed by the album's best (and, I'd say, the only really worthwhile) tune, 'Laughing Man'. It's a very nice waltz with interesting chord changes and a nice atmosphere around it, and the guitar sound is this time around imitating the Eighties' real synths - you know, those corny ones that are at the core of all the murky synth-pop records. And the song is sometimes complemented with evil sounds of laughter - I still can't understand if these are real laughs, only electronically encoded, or if Adrian imitates them with the guitar as well (in which case this is a definite technological improvement since Dave Gilmour's 'laughing guitar' in the middle of the solo on 'Dogs').
After a couple zillion listens, one also starts to appreciate a little bit 'The Gypsy Zurna', which is indeed built on gypsy motives (the wild percussion on that one is really atmospheric, and the guitar's Eastern flavor is this time fully justified); and for some reason I find myself intrigued by 'Portrait Of Margaret', with one of the wildest, nastiest, most freakingly 'poisonous' guitar tones I've ever witnessed. Last time I heard something like that was while listening to the Police's 'Behind My Camel' (an excellent tune, by the way - kudos to dudes who awarded it the Grammy! Why people always hate that one is beyond me). It's just so spooky and disturbing that it easily drives you out of the coma you fall into at about the third or fourth minute into the record. Still, it would probably be nothing more than a piece of forgettable filler on any of King Crimson's Eighties' albums.
The last four tunes just drop out on me - sorry all ye Adrian fans. At least, most of them are short enough, so you don't go around spraying your hate on all the objects around you for very long. 'Guernica' just sucks, and I could care less for the associations - it's nothing more than a bunch of cacophonous guitar noises for me. And the fact that the 'laughing man gimmick' is reproduced again at the end of "Z" doesn't mean that I have to sit through it in its entirety for what seems like ages; he's going for an Eno-ish kind of 'half-ambient' sound on here, but unfortunately, when it comes to experimentation with Sound, Adrian doesn't have a one hundredth dose of talent for such things that Eno has.
A major fuck-up, in short: Adrian should obviously steer clear of experiments like this, because Desire amply demonstrates that his main strength lies in a skilful marriage of his one-man band experimental approach with a decent pop melody. Without being clad in a memorable, distinctively structured form, this fiddling with guitars is just like a faceless, bland ghost. Fortunately, Adrian seemed to understand that, and he retired from making such kind of records for years.
Later on that year, Adrian formed his own group, called The Bears, and recorded two albums with it, none of which I have heard so far; the stunt, however, proved rather short-lived, and by the end of the Eighties he went back to making solo records - amazingly, it turned out to be a blessing.

Laughing man! Don't laugh at me! Mail your ideas!

MR MUSIC HEAD
(released by ADRIAN BELEW)

Year Of Release: 1989
Overall rating = 10

A bit too heavy on rudimentary dance beat patterns, but compensating it with rich vocal melodies. Belew's a good lad.
Best song: OH DADDY

This record really threw Belew into the limelight - well, critical, at least, as I doubt that too many people on the planet have ever heard the name itself. With Mr Music Head, Belew fully shakes off the Crimson shackles and engages on his own curious solo career, effectively transforming himself into one of the most obscure, yet one of the most diverse and intriguing popmeisters of the late Eighties/early Nineties. And, while Mr Music Head is not as tight-gripping or immediately likeable as its more adventurous follow-up, Young Lions, it's perhaps even more important to those who have a soft spot for Adrian: out of all his records, it's easily the most sincere-going and even autobiographical. His later records are mostly 'Belew imitates the Beatles', 'Belew imitates Byrne', 'Belew imitates Bowie', etc.; on Mr Music Head, apart from a few evident stylizations like 'One Of Those Days', Belew is obviously trying to carve out his own pop identity, and he mostly succeeds. Pity he didn't really stick with it for too long.
The general flaw here is that Adrian's melodies are not too - howdjasay - not too consistent, I guess. He has a way of knocking you over the head as if with a hammer as soon as you put something on: the music is so charmingly silly, so friendly and so light and playful that one can only wonder where on Earth you were before, ignoring the output of this postmodernistic genius. The problem is - most of them are too light to be memorable. This is partially due to Adrian's main principle of recording - no guests. He records everything himself, and thus one can never hope to have a carefully crafted sound texture or anything. His drumming is quite professional, and he's excellent at creating really innovative and experimental drum machine patterns; likewise, when he goes for riffing, his riffs are cool and his guitar tones are enthralling. But it's just that there's too much for him to do, and too often, these songs just remind one of half-baked, average demos. 'Peaceable Kingdom', for instance - the number is supposed to sound African, and it does, with the only instrumentation being several layers of ethnic percussion and various chirps and tweeps and squirks emitted by parrots and chimpanzees, I guess. It's still pretty in its naiveness and simplicity, but I suppose it was just more simple for Adrian to produce this kind of stuff than a fully-instrumented song in its place.
Likewise, the entire second half of the album seems very much hit and miss to me. For the most part, it consists of a set of weird electronic pop-rockers - 'Hot Zoo', 'Motor Bungalow', 'Bumpity Bump' and 'Bird In A Box' all have a certain amount of potential, but I can't get rid of the feeling that essentially Adrian's just endlessly recycling one vibe on these. 'Hot Zoo' features, like, two or three chords repeated over and over, the vocals are echoey and ununderstandable, and, while I appreciate all these jungle sounds that fill the empty spaces, they get monotonous after a while, too. 'Motor Bungalow' has fantastic lyrics that describe Belew's cosmopolitic fantasies, but it sounds like the melody was thrown together in a couple of minutes as well (you gotta dig those paranoid drum machines, though, especially their little 'solo spot' in the middle of the song). And the next two songs are structured more or less the same, except that 'Bird In A Box' is a little bit more heavy on the guitar. Not a bad or an offensive sequence, but a fairly unimaginative one - and I'm speaking of a guy who can imitate an entire orchestra with just one guitar. Oh well, maybe he just didn't have the time or something.
And at least, all these mistakes are perfectly compensated for on the better numbers. For starters, the lead-in number 'Oh Daddy' might just be THE greatest pop song of 1989 par excellence, as nearly everything about it is perfect. The lyrical matter - a dialogue between an unlucky and an awkwardly shy 'daddy' who cannot, or doesn't want to be a big star, and his daughter who urges him on to 'write that big hit'. For the record, Belew's real daughter, the 11-year old Audie Belew, sings backup vocals, and she sings 'em far better than quite a few fully grown-up women I've had the misfortune to hear in my life... The melody - an intoxicating piano pattern, and a sly, 'hookable' guitar riff popping out at just the right times. And, of course, the friendliness and playfulness the likes of which you'd hardly be meeting on any other record at that time.
Nothing really holds up to that standard, but that's no problem. 'House Of Cards' has a gorgeous vocal melody (that's where Belew really shines, by the way - he often manages to salvage even a really weak track with his singing and vocal hooks), and its message - 'wake up, get out of that house of cards' - is quite authentic and sincere. The chorus is so uplifting it's gonna nullify all your personal problems in a second. If you can stand drum machines, of course. Then there's 'One Of Those Days' - a terrif Jerry Lee Lewis rip-off, but I adore it even if it is a rip-off. He's stealing the melody of 'End Of The Road', as far as I understand, but he's actually embellishing the song by substituting his own lyrics - a great nostalgic description of a picnic from the perspective of the Lord himself. No kidding. And 'Bad Days' is one of the greatest broken relations' anthems ever recorded: the incredible thing is that Belew's actually playing a cheerful rhythm on the piano, over which he overdubs his own soulful, plaintive intonations. There are apparently McCartneyesque notes on here - the song's atmosphere is a teeny-weeny bit reminiscent of 'For No One' (and there are Lennonesque notes, too, in the guise of some backwards guitars).
The Beatlesque ambitions, of course, don't fully emerge until the last two tracks. 'Cruelty To Animals' is crap: it's Belew's tribute to 'Revolution #9', a four-minute sound collage consisting, quite frankly, of all the special sound effects he'd used previously on the album plus other elements he hadn't. I suppose even those who get their kicks out of the original will have to admit that an imitation of 'Revolution #9' is a pretty weird idea. On the other hand, '1967' is a very pretty (although not tremendously memorable) acoustic suite entirely in the vein of, say, 'Little Lamb Dragonfly'. Lyrically it's structured as a venture into Belew's own mind - describing his inner emotions, feelings and images, and it's a pretty entertaining journey. And musically, it's at least very refreshing after the sequence of four drum-machine pop-rockers I've described above: Belew's quite nice at acoustic picking, and every now and then he even has something close to a great musical idea (the riff in the 'if the bat-winged beast sweeps down...' section, for instance).
This was, of course, only the rough beginning of Belew's later Beatles imitations - but for the time being, he was still more intent on creating something more original, or, at least, sending his 'experimental rip-offs' in more directions. Like on Young Lions.

Bad days follow you all your life if you don't mail your ideas

YOUNG LIONS
(released by ADRIAN BELEW)

Year Of Release: 1990
Overall rating = 11

Belew imitates everybody on here - and the results are smashing. As long as you don't shut off the actual CD.
Best song: PRETTY PINK ROSE

By the early Nineties, Belew had completely assumed the mask of an imitator; but Young Lions is a rather vague record in that respect - inside of concentrating on some particular aspect, Belew works in the vein of just about everybody he can think about. This explains the fact that the material on here ranges from a cover of the Traveling Wilburys to two collaborations with Bowie (Belew's former 'master' - Adrian used to play guitar for him), and connotations with the Talking Heads, Fifties' pop, and, of course, King Crimson themselves, are found in abundance.
This shouldn't, of course, detract one from the fact that most of these imitations are SWELL. Now, as Adrian got more and more involved in creating song-filled albums instead of avantgarde guitar experiments, his main flaw finally comes to life: he is not a very talented songwriter. And hey, I've said that about millions of dudes on this site, but this time you gotta believe me - the man's main talents do not lie in creative melodies. Very few of the songs are actually memorable: they sound magnificent while you're listening, and they do have hooks, but it's some strange kind of hooks, the ones that don't linger in your head at all. He does get out sometimes - on the covers and on 'Pretty Pink Rose', see below - but most of the songs that are credited to Adrian never have enough musical substance to come across as chef-d'oeuvres. Oh, well: I suppose God plans all his donations of talent wisely. Because if the actual melodies were solid and memorable, I simply couldn't just speak of Adrian as a terrific musical stunt-maker: I'd have to speak of him as, quite possibly, the greatest musical force of the Nineties.
As it is, the re-make of 'Heartbeat' (why Adrian wasn't just content with the regular Crimson version isn't clear) fully demonstrates what constitutes a great melody and what doesn't. Regardless, the re-make is very nice and not at all inferior in comparison to the original, and hell, I loved the song in the first place, so how can its own co-author ruin it? But something tells me that Fripp was more involved in creating that melody...
The Wilburys cover (presaging Belew's soon-to-come albums of Beatles imitations) is 'Not Alone Anymore', one of the band's slightly less interesting numbers: it's an operatic ballad, sung by the late Roy Orbison. However, Belew gives it a slightly electronic treatment, adds funny finger-clicks, and since his voice is nowhere near as powerful as Roy's, manages to convert it from insecure bombast into groovy fun.
The absolutely best material on here, however, are the two tracks that Belew shares with Mr Davy Jones. 'Gunman' is disturbing, amazing and tense in its paranoia: if anything, it is extremely reminiscent of Bowie's Scary Monsters period. David sings it himself, by the way; and his troubled, whacko intonations, together with the spooky, apocalyptic lyrics and Belew's insane guitar solos, make the song an unforgettable album closer. But, as far as I'm concerned, 'Pretty Pink Rose' is even better. It's not as delirious as other songs on the album, but it rocks harder than everything else on here taken in one big heap. It's catchy - hey, after all, it's a pure Bowie number. It's credited to David alone, he sings it, and Belew just plays guitar - like in the good old days when David was Da Boss and Adrian was just the chief guitarist and no-one else. The guitar tears your ears to shreds, though. And oh boy oh boy, is this number addictive - so steady, so upbeat, so melodic... I don't think I'll make a big mistake if I say that 'Pretty Pink Rose' could well be the best song Bowie ever came up with since, well, since his Fripp/Eno period. Fans of David, take heed! Got an extra buck to spare?
Now, the trickiest theme. Belew's self-penned material. Audio-wise, everything rules. I haven't yet mentioned that Adrian plays all the instruments, as usual, but I think with this man-orchestra, it goes without saying. These remaining six tunes are wonderful examples of what I'd call 'inventive Nineties sound', if there ever was one: New Wave updated with latest guitar-enhancing technologies and various stuff I don't even know the names of. It's all rousing and attention-drawing, even if not really innovative. 'I Am What I Am', for instance, features some wild instrumental background over which a muffled vocal recites a strange, preachy dialogue telling you, well, to believe that you are what you are, whatever the circumstances. Can't argue with that one, although I'd sure love to know who's the 'vocalist' on that one. Bowie? He's credited for appearing on the track... Weird.
The title track, meanwhile, is a blatant Bowie-imitation itself - you know, something in the vein of 'Secret Life Of Arabia'. Utmost fun and a strange perverse romantic atmosphere mixed in with tribal elements. 'Looking For A U.F.O.' is a strangely under-arranged pop ditty a la Fifties; 'Men In Helicopters' has a really strong vocal melody, with beautiful harmonies as Adrian blurts out some ecological lyrics; and 'Phone Call From The Moon' is structured in the fine tradition of 'Rocket Man'. Hey, there's really no need to discuss all this stuff seriously - like I said, it's all just a big, wonderful put-on. Belew is like a Marc Bolan of the Nineties: mostly borrowing stuff from others, but making it exciting and definitely adding a stamp of his own bizarre nature onto everything.

Looking for a UFO, are you? Stop wasting time and mail your ideas!

THE ACOUSTIC ADRIAN BELEW
(released by ADRIAN BELEW)

Year Of Release: 1993
Overall rating = 9

Very superfluous and superficial; this is clearly not Belew's sphere, but he doesn't seem to think so...
Best song: MEN IN HELICOPTERS

This is the first of two completely acoustic records that Adrian has released in the Nineties (the next one was 1998's Belewprints), and neither of the two add much to his reputation. To be completely fair and honest, though, none of the two are bad or anything - just somewhat excessive. Also, both have only been in print for a very limited time span, and most of the other time they were only available through direct contact with Adrian's company (if I'm not mistaken, it's the regular Crimson label, Discipline). Selections from both albums have been collected together and placed with several new numbers (like 'Fly' and 'Three Of A Perfect Pair') on the compilation Salad Days, which seems to be the only 'remainder' of Adrian's acoustic exercises currently in print.
I have been able to scoop up the Russian releases of both of these acoustic albums, but I'm not exactly happy with the result. Oh, no, it is definitely a very nice gesture, and it's always pleasant to witness an experimental guitar star sometimes go unplugged and deliver a bunch of 'no-bull' versions of his compositions; this is supposed to remind us that sonic effects and weirdness, no matter what one says, are always inferior to things most important to music - melody, harmony, well, what am I talking about, you know all that already. Unfortunately, I can't say that this record is very entertaining. First of all, Adrian isn't a great acoustic player. Of course, I may be biased, as since 1992 I'm subconsciously judging all acoustic performances by the standards of Clapton's Unplugged; but in any case, I just don't get the point. He is honestly copying all his riffs and inserting rudimentary solos and sometimes throwing in an ingenious staccato, but the more I try to soak in the atmosphere, the more I realise that Adrian's main skill really is experimentation - he seems to almost be thrown off guard when he finds out that he can't diversify the tone much. Where are the knobs and the pedals and the fuzz and the synthesized effects? They're nowhere, and they certainly can't be substituted by solid, but never outstanding acoustic rhythm playing.
In fact, Adrian's pointless cover of 'If I Fell' perfectly symbolizes the lack of sense: it's nice, of course, and his Beatles' imitation is excellent, as usual, but do we really need yet another proof that yes, Adrian can imitate the Beatles? The only use I can make of this song is to play a trick on some unsuspicious friend of mine - 'look, here's a newly-uncovered Beatles demo version, how much would you give me for it?' Bah. And 'Matte Kudasai' is as gorgeous as ever, but I really really miss the 'heavenly' guitar effects that made the original so much more poignant.
Otherwise, the material is all taken from Belew's solo records, mainly from Inner Revolution, although a couple of tracks date back to his early Eighties' solo efforts (Lone Rhino, Twang Bar King), and another couple is taken from Young Lions (these were originally present only on the Japanese version). After several listens, they do click on you, and everything starts to work - 'Burned By The Fire We Make' and 'Crying' are beautiful, 'The Man In The Moon' is melancholic, and 'Old Fat Cadillac' is hilarious. But that only happens after several listens, when you've already had enough of lamenting over the lack of exciting arrangements, and I still don't understand what they can add to the originals. To tell the truth, I would have far preferred to have some demo versions instead - at least, demo versions provide you with an insight into the working process of the artist. But latter-period stripped-down rearrangements? Hmm. (One should, however, mark that 'Burned By The Fire We Make' wouldn't appear in its 'regular' version until a year later on Here).
If anything really stands out, it's the Young Lions material - 'Young Lions' and 'Men In Helicopters' were originally rip-roaring, bellowing tracks, and I was kinda interested in how the guy would really manage to quiet them down. He does manage - 'Young Lions' just becomes a powerful romantic ballad, and the vocals in 'Men In Helicopters', taken together with Belew's furious strumming, make you really forget all about the lack of 'noise'. I suppose I must give Adrian his due and say that his voice is in top form throughout - on the other hand, he copies all the originals note-for-note, so that bad tongues could even suppose that he just lifted the vocals from the original electric versions. Heh heh. For some reason, the record ends with a stupid gesture: a track called 'Martha Adored' whose origin I'm not too sure of, but the thing is, Belew decided to record it backwards - which means you have to sit through two minutes of ear torture just to justify a completely sickening, perverse experimental urge. This Belew guy is truly a hit and miss one.
All things considered, I give the album a nine, but hardcore Belew fans might easily increase the rating, if only because it gives a great opportunity for the rabid Belewer to study Adrian's playing techniques in detail. It's like thrusting some sheetnotes right under your nose, you understand.

Crying, I still wait for your ideas

OP ZOP TOO WAH
(released by ADRIAN BELEW)

Year Of Release: 1996
Overall rating = 10

Belew's major piece de resistance - what a pity that he forgot to stuff it with more melodies this time around.
Best song: SIX STRING

Adrian's 1996 effort is easily the most 'serious' attempt at music-writing he ever made. As is the usual thing with him, he proves himself master of exotic guitar techniques and crazy percussion rhythms, abstaining from the pseudo-Beatles stylistics he'd developed on his previous two song albums of the Nineties. But this time around, he decides to exceed the limits and go beyond the scopes of his pop efforts. So Op Zop Too Wah is loosely structured as a 'concept' album (yeah, I do mean these quotes, as there's really no serious unifying concept to these songs to be found), with a staggering number of tracks - twenty-one - and lots of various links and brief, one-minute musical snippets tying the songs to each other; the album flows almost non-stop and alternates different styles and grooves almost instantaneously. Does this work?
Well - partially. Perverse, maybe, but so far, this is the weakest song-dominated Belew album I've heard. The links are cute, but they're not too funny or intriguing: usually, it's just a short bit of some crazyass guitar solo ('A Plate Of Guitar', 'Conversation Piece') or an unstandard drum pattern ('World Play Drum Beat', with Adrian's percussion accompanied by a random collection of spoken words), or a half-interesting musical idea that doesn't have enough time to be fully developed ('What Do You Know', both parts; 'In My Backyard'). So, in the end, they do more harm than good - they take the listener's attention from the 'meat' of the album and are horrendously deconcentrating. I would even go as far as to program some of them out, because it takes a great deal of listens to fully appreciate the value of songs like 'Six String' or 'Beautiful' or 'All Her Love Is Mine'; subconsciously, I just treat them as 'part of the package'. And since the package hardly works as a whole - it's meaningless and manneristic, the songs do not work either unless you manage to grapple them out and analyze them one by one, peeled of the incessant gimmickry that really and truly gets on my nerves.
So here's the song material. Some numbers are clearly just polygons for Belew to showcase his guitar skills, and I don't mind: his guitar playing skill is only increasing as years go by, and the opening dissonant riffs of 'Of Bow And Drum', I suppose, are enough to demonstrate that. The vocal sections of the number are rather rote, something like psychedelia badly chained with world beat, but the guitar is top notch throughout. For more head-spinning rhythms one should check out the title track - more world beat, but this time, not a single sign of psychedelia around (to help the matter, it's completely instrumental). And 'High Wire Guitar', arranged as a mock-live track, is probably the most Crimsonian stuff on here: if only the Frippergang Volume Four would consider adding something like that to their THRaKaTTaK album instead of all the dumb dissonant crap they stuffed on their to hurt our poor little ears with, the world would have rejoiced and breathed a sigh of relief. (And I would have done without two pairs of broken headphones).
Now, when it comes to the actual songs, the problem that's typical for Adrian stands up again - melodies, melodies and melodies again. Brr. He does come up with at least one melodic masterpiece - the mock-country rocker 'Six String', whose style is really borrowed from the Traveling Wilburys (check out Adrian's version of 'Not Alone Any More' on Young Lions and tell me it ain't so). It's gracefully decorated with steel guitar to make it more 'authentic', but of course, you can't really mistake the song for something different from a 'Belew-Frig-Up', as the guy never denies himself the pleasure to insert some delightful weirdness in his guitar playing, not to mention singing.
But few of the other songs are really all that memorable. He always tries to make the melodies complicated and independent of traditional rhyme schemes, but truth is that he's not an inborn master of twisted melody, and in the end it all comes down to the problem of mood and atmosphere. 'All Her Love Is Mine' is a really cool tune, but it's not because I'm actually impressed by great chord sequences or anything: it's the dark, dusky mood of the song, the ominous, jagged twirls of lead guitar and the ghostly falsetto in the chorus that really contribute to the number. I like it when a love song is arranged as something spooky - untrivial contrasts are sure welcome, even if housewives may not be in total agreement over this one. Then there are some pretty pretty acoustic ballads, like 'Beautiful', and some pretty pretty acoustic piano ballads, like 'The Ruin After The Rain'; but beware - they're not at all memorable, and atmosphere isn't everything. And there are some more vaguely psychedelic rockers, some uplifting ('On'), some rather repetitive without being rather catchy ('I Remember How To Forget'), some plain befuddling ('Modern Man Hurricane Blues' - what the shit is THAT?) Nothing really goes completely over the top, like that dumb bonus track at the end of Mr Music Head, but really few things stand out and a-loudly and a-proudly proclaim their presence, either. Columbus this guy is not.
There's another point that doesn't exactly make me happy: this is, in general, a drearier and heavier album than anything Adrian ever did before (I'm not saying 'seriouser', because (a) that's ungrammatical, (b) I already said something like that in the beginning of this review and (c) Adrian Belew, a serious guy? C'mon, ye must be jokin'!). I like Belew when he's either cheerful and silly, as in 'Oh Daddy', or when he's sly and eccentric, as on most of the tracks from Young Lions. When he's starting to depress me by playing all these spooky beats and gothic love ballads and turbulent psychedelic passages, I can't but help thinking that he's just ripping off David Byrne or Peter Gabriel, the real masters of heavy psychologic thrill. This is definitely not his patented style, and although Op Zop Too Wah is still saved by a large number of acceptable tracks, an incredible sense of diversity and an overall smart, intelligent feel, I really hope he won't be continuing in the same direction on his further albums. I really do hope so.

I remember how to forget, but I won't forget it if you fail to mail your ideas

BELEWPRINTS
(released by ADRIAN BELEW)

Year Of Release: 1998
Overall rating = 10

More diverse than his previous acoustic effort, but also less distinctive - some songs are undistinguishable from the originals.
Best song: FREE AS A BIRD

Significantly better than The Acoustic A.B., if only for the reason that this is an 'unplugged' album as opposed to the 'acoustic' character of the previous effort in the genre. Which means that Belew is not just playing acoustic guitar here - some of the songs feature a rhythm section as well, and some are piano-based rather than guitar-based. This sometimes results in what I'd call 'conceptual stupidities': thus, the versions of '1967', 'Bad Days' and 'One Of Those Days' (from Mr Music Head) sound almost exactly like the originals - on first listen, you'd be able to swear he just took 'em off the original record without changing a sound, especially since Belew is a poor vocal improviser and seems determined to never change a single note in the vocal melodies, not to mention inspired, or even uninspired, ad libbing. Oh well, at least these songs are good.
And he redeems himself by making the album sound diverse - instead of concentrating on the balladeering side, he cleverly transforms what could be an entirely passable effort into an anthology of sorts. The track listing does feature several Beatlish ballads ('Bad Days'; 'Big Blue Sun'; 'Everything'; '1967'), but there's also some powerful Crimson ('Dinosaur'), some typical Belew ('Young Lions' again), some of the grim-looking 'acid Belew' from Op Zop ('I Remember How To Forget'), and some sonic explorations a la THraKaTTaK ('Things You Hit With A Stick', 'Return Of The Chicken').
And this time around, there's enough weird surprises to get the interest level flowing relatively high. The album starts with yet another version of 'Men In Helicopters' (Adrian must really be an ecology-obsessed dude), accompanied by a string quartet - and it's oh so much better than just hearing Adrian pinch and pound his acoustic. The 'sonic explorations' are, of course, forgettable, but kinda funny, throwing in some pseudo-worldbeats on 'Things You Hit...' and featuring funny chicken noises in 'Return Of The Chicken'; for reasons unknown, the latter is reprised once again at the end of the record in a longer version, this time sporting the name 'Nude Wrestling With A Christmas Tree'.
The biggest surprise, though, is Adrian's performance of Lennon's 'Free As A Bird', recorded live at the Longacre Theater, NYC. No, don't frown: this has nothing to do with the Jeff Lynne bastardisation, whether you like it or not; it's just Adrian sitting at a piano and engaging in a flawless imitation of John. Don't believe it? I haven't heard John's original demo version, but I've heard quite a few other John piano demos, and Belew perfectly recreates - not just the sound, but the very atmosphere. Even the mumblings that he substitutes the lyrics with from time to time are pronounced as if they were uttered by John (not surprisingly, the audience mostly greets him with applause at the very moments where he goes 'mm-mm-mm-mm' - and no, that's not because his singing is shitty). It's things like that which make me believe that Belew is a real understander of the Beatles' spirit, not just a pretentious mannerist. Sure, he's not a genius like John or Paul, and when he starts composing his rip-offs, his actual skills are nowhere near as good, but he really understands and lives that music, and that's a good thing - not everyone is able to do that. And yup, I know I condemned him for duplicating 'If I Fell' on The Acoustic A. B., but I suppose that his performance of 'Bird' can almost be considered 'ritualistic' to an extent - purifying the great Lennon tune from the dregs that Mr Lynne laid upon it and introducing the pure beauty of the chords and the clear, high voice to the general public. It would have not been like that were the ex-Beatles to release the demo itself instead of tampering with it. On the other hand, 'If I Fell' is just a near-flawless copy that has no 'social importance' at all - and that's where the rub lies.
Apart from that, it's really funny to hear Adrian blast his way through the acoustic rendition of 'Dinosaur' - turns out that the tune can be influential and atmospheric enough even without the roar of Fripp's guitars: the dreaded lines 'I'm a dinosaur/Somebody is digging my bones' hits just as hard as the original. And, while nothing else sticks out particularly (I mean, nothing else differs that much from the originals), the general quality of material is also higher than last time around: in any case, I'd take 'Everything', 'Big Blue Sun', and '1967' over 'The Rail Song' and 'The Lonely Rhinoceros' any time of day.
In short, Belewprints is a really enjoyable, never boring product that even non-fans could get interested in - just to witness the old guy's forces. It's currently out of print (though hardcore fans can easily contact DGM for a copy, I'm sure), but most of the tracks are available on the Salad Days compilation, which, I suppose, could be quite a reasonable purchase. But don't put that real high on your shopping list: if you are really determined to get acquainted with Mr Belew, remember that acoustic playing is not one of his main gifts. You'd do better to pick up some 'classics' like Young Lions instead.

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