King Crimson – Lizard

Greetings, fellow persons!

Sorry about the delay in updates, but this whole week was spent doing some awesome stuff like “modding” my Mp3 player to do amazing things like play video game soundtracks and Bejeweled on top of its already awesome audiophilic capabilities (I’m totally a FLAC fiend now). Also I had to do holiday shopping, attend parties and, oh yeah, finally obtain some gainful employment, since this blog doesn’t pay for itself unfortunately.

Thus, it’s been a hectic, confusing, yet ultimately rewarding week for me, so I have decided to top it all off with an album that… well ok I selected this at random, but here you go, King Crimson’s Lizard:

Yeah keep telling me you miss the olden days of album covers. I'm listening.

While looking back at old entries of this here blog, I was surprised at first that I never wrote about this album, but then I remembered the very important reason why: I had no idea what to say about it.

All I could remember about my first listen to Lizard was NOTES and then NOOOOTES (Notes). I really don’t think any coherent thought entered my mind in the 42 1/2 minutes of the album’s run-time, which is odd because this blog might show you that I have a lot of thoughts about music usually.

Fast-forward a year or so, and something magical happened: a guy from a prog group called Porcupine Tree decided to work with Robert Fripp to painstakingly remaster, from the original master tapes, ALL of the King Crimson catalogue. Despite this being a very good idea, since master tape remasters are practically the only way to get these ancient albums to sound good on modern mp3/vgm/Bejeweled players, it was also kind of a predictable idea, since King Crimson had already issued 30th AND 35th Anniversary remasters of their old material. Still, from the master tapes, maaaaan.

Among the first albums to be remastered, quite mysteriously, was Lizard, so this is where I gave Lizard what I would consider my first true listen. Then again. Then again. Then again… to be honest, I’m not done listening to it, but at least I’ve finally formulated enough opinions to write a blog entry!

Fact is, I had so much trouble coming up with a single coherent thought about the album because there isn’t a single coherent thought IN the album. I have now listened to the album dozens, possibly hundreds of times, and I know every single note by heart, but I can’t begin to try and guess why any two of them are put together the way they are.

Of course, the 40th anniversary re-issue of the album comes with some  pretty interesting liner notes (penned by Fripp himself) which, when paired with the Internet, paints a rather interesting story about the album’s production.

Without going into too much detail about the band’s personnel problems in those early days between 1967 and 2009, I will say that King Crimson were basically like watching a typical teenage garage band go through the motions of getting together, going nowhere, and breaking up, except instead of that middle bit, you’ve got “becomes the biggest rock band in the world for a while”. Despite having the world in the palm of their hands through a combination of VERY quickly cultivating a uniquely complex sound the likes of which had never been heard, showcasing extraordinary musicianship with even more extraordinary focus on music rather than image, and as Fripp put it himself, being in the right place at the right time, King Crimson simply could NOT get started on that crawling thing before they were already running.

At the time that Lizard was being recorded, they had already lost vocalist/bassist/donut fiend Greg Lake to a little-known band whose name escapes me at the moment, and that was after losing everybody else as well. Basically, Fripp was a man without a band (but his non-musician lyricist remained, more on that later), so he decided to rebuild from scratch.

Apparently Fripp didn’t get the memo that you’re not supposed to include a jazz pianist and four woodwind/brass players in your hard rock band, so that’s exactly what he did. Still, if you were the only member of a garage band that left you and the only other musicians you know from school are in the marching band, are you going to say no?  Also joining the fray is, not kidding, his actual highschool bandmate/roommate Gordon Haskell on bass and vocals, and the only drummer he could find who would take part in this mess, a hero by any standard named Ian McCulloch.

With this motley crew of masterful musicians, Fripp finally had a force to be reckoned with; a band that would record an album that, maybe this time, would not sound quite so much like a repeat of In The Court.

Well, it sure wasn’t a repeat of In The Court, in sound or amount of success, but the fact that the album even happened is perhaps even more a miracle than the huge success that was the band’s first album. Basically, let’s just say that collecting such an assorted cast of kids did not lead to a lot of civilized agreement of ideas, and when your vocalist/bassist is only good at one of those things and doesn’t even like the music, well… let’s talk about the music!

It starts off with some synthy kind of harp strumming sounds, which is not bad, and then Haskell’s voice kind of staggers into the door spilling cough medicine (the type that they ban in most countries) all over the place, and your first thought might well be “Dude, do you need to lie down or turn on a humidifier or something?” And then he punches you and you can hear the wail of ambulance sirens as the paramedics revive you and, oh wait, that’s just Fripp’s guitar playing brash, diminished bits on his guitar as Gordon’s voice comes back in with all the clarity of a wet shoe.

Still, it’s hard to tell what’s more congested, Gordon’s voice or Peter Sinfield’s lyrics. The first track is called “Cirkus” (back before Mortal Kombat made it decidedly un-cool to replace c’s with k’s willy-nilly), and is full of rather obnoxious words strung together by pure pretense, which would seem like faulty songwriting if not for the fact that the same can be said about the music itself.

The material gets even more ridiculous afterward, in fact the song “Indoor Games” ends with a genuine burst of laughter from Haskell as he attempts to figure out how best to emotionally deliver the line “Hey ho”. An understandable bemusement, to tell the truth. Add to this some rather intriguing clean guitar riffs trading off with the saxophone, and you’ve got a song that is by no means bad, if bad songs are something you like.

The next song, “Happy Family“, doesn’t feature any corpsing, but does contain some thinly-veiled allegorical statements about The Beatles, a somewhat well-known rock band from whom Fripp apparently derived the idea to make an entire band around recreating the musical shock that was the ending to Sgt. Pepper. To be honest, the lyrics might be terrible in this piece as well, but Gordon’s voice is so well hidden behind a rather tasty synthesizer effect (plus his own natural store of phlegm and wintertime nuts) that, mercifully, not a word can be understood by humans.

After all that fun nonsense, we go into WHOAH WHERE DID THAT FLUTE COME FROM… I mean, “Lady of the Dancing Water”, a song that calms the storm of weirdness either to prepare the listener for what is to come, or to try and make up for the rather melody-free events that had previously transpired. It’s a very pretty song, but I wish anyone other than Gordon Haskell had sung it, because seriously somebody give him a shot of adrenaline; I think he’s had some kind of reaction.

Finally, the fifth and final track of the CD (or the entire B side to the record) is a 23 minute opus called “Lizard”, wherein Gordon Haskell was kindly shuffled off the roster to make room for a real singer, Yes’s own castrato sensation Jon Anderson. Funny enough, after several songs’ worth of passages go by, Gordon breaks back into the studio to sing for a bit before disappearing forever and ever, missing and presumed eaten by bears.

So I have written all of this to kind of give you a sense of the chaos that has unfolded in this album, but did you see that bit up there where I said I listened to it again and again? That’s because I completely love this album.

Seriously! Sure I may idolize strong melodies, and some of my very favorite songs can be played within a single octave on a piano, but something in my brain simply becomes obsessed when weirdness, the abstract, obtuse, endlessly and needlessly complex musical ideas come into play, and boy do they come in with this album.

Your average music listener, even one who otherwise enjoys King Crimson and their razor’s edge approach to pushing the envelope into the seat of their pants, will probably detest Lizard for any number of good reasons. It sounds out of tune, it hunkers down into rather long passages of go-nowhere note tinkling, hell, it sounds like Jazz in places, but the confusion and befuddlement is what keeps me coming back for more. The anticipation of another sequence of bewildering notes is a rush to me, and thanks to the amazing remastering job in the most recent re-release, the textures and tones really sing out in a good set of headphones. All 23 minutes of the album’s ending track keeps me thoroughly entertained, which turned out to be really good training for becoming an actual Yes fan, turns out.

I truly can’t knock this album for what it is, because it really shouldn’t have been, and I am so glad it was anyway. Apart from being musically one of the most interesting things I’ve heard, it’s also a rather clear window into a band that was falling apart before it even came together, and sure enough, only 1 member of the band remained to help Fripp through the next album, and it was the damn flute player.

Also, in true garage band fashion, when drummer Ian McCulloch left the group, he was immediately replaced with his ex-roommate, who could also play the drums. God bless King Crimson.

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King Crimson – THRAK

Though I said I’d be visiting a lot of bands again by the time the year was out, this will be my last un-planned Album Du Jour entry. Until a few hours ago, I was racking my brain trying to think of what album would make a good Christmas Eve album, because I already know what album I am writing up for Christmas, but then I remembered that I hate seasonal music and thus today we are going to give King Crimson one last spin:

THRAK is that kind of album that instantly fascinates me not only because of the music, which is superb in this album, mind you, but because of the elements that might otherwise go unrecognized that make up its creation. When we last left King Crimson, it was the 80′s and they were actually making *good* music, which in and of itself was a rarity, but even rarer was the fact that, after the album Discipline, Crimson went on to record not one, but two albums with the exact same lineup. You might as well tell me a giraffe gave birth to a helicopter at that point, but let’s leave that uncomfortable metaphor quickly.

One thing that is far less surprising is that, after that trio of albums, the band broke up again, only instead of breaking up “forever and ever”, and based on the nature of King Crimson only requiring one member to exist, they more or less went “on hold” for about 10 years. A few things happened within that decade, but most of it was in the 80′s so who cares, right?

Well, fearless leader Robert Fripp was once again bored with not being in a very successful rock band  (he decided to take up teaching this time, which amassed for him another Chapman Stick player by the name of Trey Gunn, so he decided to bring back King Crimson again. The usual players were called, Adrian Belew returned to lead vocals after a solo stint as well as some work with David Bowie and his own band called The Bears (an appropriate name given the fate of other former King Crimson members, it all makes sense now!) Bassist Tony Levin was called away from his other gig of making Peter Gabriel suck less, and some new players were brought to the group as well. Trey Gunn, in an unusual move, was kind of made a “second bassist” as his instrument was the Stick and that’s what Levin played as well. Pat Mastelotto was brought on as drummer, having worked with one of Fripp’s interim projects, and then, the strange and awesome happened.

Bill Bruford, who you may remember from the band King Crimson, more or less saw a Crimson reformation starting up, and ran up to the group saying “Don’t forget about me!” Fripp couldn’t say no, because not only is Bill Bruford awesome, but this meant that King Crimson was now composed of two guitarists, two bassists, and two drummers, and thus the idea of a “double trio” was introduced. THRAK is the resulting album of having two band’s worth of members jamming out some awesome songs.

Indeed, from the heavy-hitting introduction “VROOOM” (onomatopoeia would be a freqently-visited concept on this album) which brings back the Mellotron, to the ending track of “VROOOM VROOOM (Coda)” (I love these names), the album is thick with instruments, but not in the way you’d really expect. At no easily-discernible time are instruments just playing in tandem, and neither are they venturing so far away from each other that it just sounds like a mess; instead, everything is arranged to the core, with a noticeable lack of lengthy improvisational segments. Heck, the longest song on here is just over 6 minutes and is closer to Pop than Prog. That song, by the way, is my favorite and is called “Dinosaur”.

After what seems like a double-introduction song in the form of “VROOOM” and “Coda: Marine 475″, which kind of has lyrics but then kind of doesn’t, we’re given a Mellotron-backed diminished chord wonder with a stomping rhythm that sounds like John Lennon writing and singing a Stravinsky number. Seriously, maybe it was intentional on Adrian Belew’s part, but his vocals on this song are very Lennon-esque, and the back-and-forth guitar chords sound to me exactly like a play on “I Am The Walrus”. The song’s chorus, “I am a dinosaur, somebody is digging my bones” seems to be kind of a play on King Crimson feeling a little old at this point, though plenty of groups by this time were digging their bones, Tool and Primus being notable examples. Either way, “Dinosaur” is an incredible song, and though it only bears a passing resemblance to “I Am The Walrus”, it doesn’t have the nonsense lyrics, opting instead to actually be clever with lines like “Ignorance has always been something I excel in, followed by naivety and pride”.

Instead, the nonsense lyrics would come in the form of one of the much later songs in the set called “Sex Sleep Eat Drink Dream”:

Sex sleep eat drink dream
Primal tribal apple egg vegetable eel
I have a new canoe but it does not have a wheel

Not bad at all, not bad at all. This song also has a wonderful funky-to-disaster switch-up that I am quite fond of.

In fact, the more disastrous parts of the album, particularly in the instrumentals, are really fun from a music appreciation standpoint. The album even features, for the first time ever, a gol’dern drum solo in a track called “B’Boom”, which seems to be a bit of an inevitability when you’ve got two drummers going, is what I’m thinking. The album’s title track features guitars (107 of them, according to Fripp, but that’s probably a joke) playing these nonsense chords in a way that is slightly off time, just enough to overlap and refer to another part of the rhythm. Of course, those might be the Chapman Sticks as well, it’s kind of hard to tell because I have never seen any of this stuff live, as much as it would have blown my little mind to do so.

The album’s got its tranquil moments too, which are actually quite pleasing in their own way. “Walking On Air” is the first, and is a deep-toned tune that again seems to sound like The Beatles given the Prog treatment (also known as Radiohead), and it’s a nice peaceful tune with a lead guitar duet that are played in more of an ambient way, to great effect. It’s a nice counter to the more oppressive tunes, which are mysteriously broken up across the album, such as “Radio” and “Inner Garden”, both of which are kind of fragmented and scattered across the middle of the album, not to mention that there are 3 different songs with the word “Vrooom” in them, so don’t go thinking this is a pop album, it’s every bit as confusing as prog gets.

I really do love this album, but I’m not entirely sure if it’s more because of the music or more because the “double trio” gimmick is really interesting to me, but that’s like trying to decide whether you like the peanut butter or chocolate more in a stocking full of Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups: either way, you win.

King Crimson – Discipline

Yeah sure it might have been less than two weeks since the last time, but time is short and I wanted to give King Crimson another shot before the end of the year. So today we are going to talk about the funky fresh 1980′s incarnation of Crimson, 7 years after band-leader Robert Fripp decided that King Crimson was “completely over for ever and ever”, and their first album to arrive out of that period, called Discipline:

While the 80′s destroyed a lot of music fans used to love about music before itself being destroyed by the 90′s and what music fans consider “better than the 80′s at least”, some bands came through the other side splendidly. Interestingly, the band to do that most successfully was a 70′s band that was destroyed by the 70′s. Indeed, after breaking up King Crimson, band members scattered all over the place*, taking with them a little bit of talent into some very undeserving bands (Foreigner, Genesis, and Asia, to name a couple).

Fripp, ultimately deciding against becoming a priest or monk or ice cream salesman, decided to keep doing that music thing that had previously been earning him millions. He did solo albums, collaborations, and just general musical floating. At one point he floated by a bassist called Tony Levin who was apparently so good at bass, he had no choice but to upgrade to the Chapman Stick. He was, in fact, such a master bassist, that Fripp didn’t even feel obligated to make him the singer, making him not only the longest-standing bassist in the periodic table of elements that make up the band’s ongoing roster, but also the second of a total of 6 bassists who didn’t have to take vocal duties either.

For vocal duties, Fripp enlisted not only the voice but guitar (!!!) of Adrian Belew, which turned out to be quite the smart move, as Adrian is still with the group, making him the longest-standing member of King Crimson besides Fripp himself. Bill Bruford, who once again joins as the group’s drummer (because he makes a terrible accordionist), is the third longest-standing member.

So here we have it, King Crimson round number *incoherent mumbling*, except that Fripp did think about calling the group “Discipline”, since he had broken up King Crimson “for ever and ever”, but ultimately decided to err on the side of success and revive the franchise. With this new stable line-up, King Crimson would finally be able to stay consistent with the personnel… for a total of 3 albums, of which this is the first.

With a nearly-completely new band in a completely new decade, one would expect a completely new sound for Discipline, and indeed that’s what one gets. Everything is different with this new group from the last, even down to the nationality (and therefore, accent) of the singer. Something else you might notice, as an added challenge, Bill Bruford decided to play a bit of the album without cymbals on his kit. In fact, sometimes his kit was this bastard.

Adrian Belew, on top of taking over singing duties, became the band’s lyricist as well. Though saying the word causes me to break out in a rash, I suppose the best description for his songwriting style is “quirky”. I will have to listen to more Crimson to really get a sense of what this entails, but I can tell you, based on this particular album, that it involves a lot of shouting/talking. The first track, “Elephant Talk”, is entirely spoken, but somewhat melodically.

“Elephant Talk” also features the tapping of the Chapman Stick from Mr. Levin, and to hear the song, you would probably swear you were hearing Primus. This is, by no means, a bad things, but certainly one can see the influence Crimson had on our favorite band with its own genre in this track. It becomes apparent that the song derives its title from one of Adrian’s interesting guitar effects, wherein he makes it sound like an elephant. The man can make that guitar make funny noises, for shore.

The second track, “Frame By Frame”, features something really fast happening on some kind of stringed instrument. Is it the stick? Fripp’s guitar? Someone else’s thing? I don’t know, but it’s awesome, I can tell you that much. The entire track, minus the singing (which is also pretty great), reminds me a bit of the ol’ Ozric Tentacles.

Then we get “Matte Kudasai”, an Eastern-influenced track with a title that translates from Japanese to “Please Wait” in English. I am pretty sure the “Matte Kudasai”, besides being in the actual song, also has the meaning that one should wait through this song before the album gets awesome again.

The album does indeed get awesome again, with a track called “Indiscipline”, which starts off sounding like nonsense, but erupts into this dissonant jam that… also kind of sounds like Primus. Either way, the lyrics are once again spoken by Belew, as he alludes to some kind of thing he has made and how much he likes it. A quick Wikipedia search reveals that it’s from a letter from Belew’s then-wife describing a statue she had made. While the song on its own merits is awesome and the lyrics mysterious, that revelation about the origins of the lyrics kind of undermines that a bit. If anything, it just shows that Belew was married to a very boring woman.

The next track, “Thela Hun Ginjeet”, once again features a lengthy spoken-word section by the singer, but at least it’s broken up by some nonsense singing (well ok the title is “Heat In The Jungle”). Either way, the talking is not as audible as the playing, so I’m confused as to which pointless thing I should be listening to. It’s like the song should have been an instrumental but failed to do so because someone wouldn’t stop talking.

Actually, the next track is a proper instrumental, called “The Sheltering Sky”. There’s not a lot to say about it besides that the extra-warbly guitar reminds me of an old Nintendo game called Zelda II: The Adventure Of Link at points. That’s it!

Finally, we get another Stick-tastic track that happens to be the album’s title track. There’s even less to say about it than the previous song, as it is also an instrumental, and there are even less changes in it. Still, a King Crimson instrumental is bound to be a better instrumental than most others you’ll find, so I’ll take what I can get!

Well, it looks like King Crimson did fairly all right for themselves after such a long pause, despite throwing their mellotron to the sharks. This album is widely considered a favorite, though I am still more partial to the grandios orchestral-sounding stuff. Still, this is a great album, and even if you aren’t the musically-inclined type that would go “oooh ahhh” at the techniques used to make this music, there might still be something to enjoy here… no? Not at all? I wouldn’t know, I’ve been in love with Chapman Sticks since I was a teenager, so I guess I’m just weird.

*Editor’s Note: an error in research previously led us to write that they had been eaten by bears, this apparently was only half truth. Jamie Muir, by all accounts, was totally eaten by a bear.

King Crimson – Red

Today’s been a hectic day for me, as I am in the process of moving back to Austin after a relatively unsuccessful “break” here in my hometown. It’ll be nice to get back to business, but the whole packing and loading trucks thing has caused undue delay in today’s album writing. I will say, at least, that I knew what I was going to write about at least since yesterday. I really wanted to give King Crimson another shot, and in keeping with my seemingly chaotic treatment of their chronology, am going to talk about their “final” album before first breaking up in 1974. So here we go, here’s King Crimson’s aptly-named Red:

I have been listening to King Crimson for a while now, and I really only feel like I barely know them. I don’t know, maybe because there’s just so much to know (one could easier learn French than recall all of the personnel shifts this band went through), and also because the music is still a little bit over my head. Even though the Red album is centered around the band being a “trio” (plus 1 or 5 other musicians at various points), some of this stuff is so confusing that I have to listen to it about 5 times through just to get this far into the writeup.

Last we left the band (chronologically), they had just put out one of their best works, Larks’ Tongues In Aspic, featuring some brilliant musicianship, thanks in no small part to the fantastic lineup they had going for them in the aftermath of pretty much everyone in the band but Robert Fripp circa the Islands album being eaten by bears.

Alas, the lineup of guitarist/fearless leader Robert Fripp, bassist/vocalist John Wetton, drummer extraordinaire Bill Bruford, stay-at-home lyricist Richard Palmer-James, and red-shirt cadets Jamie Muir and David Cross (no relation to the comedian) would start to dwindle after the Larks’ Tongues experience. First, Jamie Muir would have some kind of mental problem and wind up leaving the band unexpectedly to a nearby bear-filled forest, and after an album weirdly called Starless And Bible Black, violinist David Cross apparently got voted off the team for reasons Wikipedia seem hesitant to go into. I’d say it was probably to save the young man’s life from all these wild animals running rampant.

When the time came to make a new album, the remaining three members weren’t exactly in the best shape. Fripp had gone all spiritual and was under the impression that the world was about to end (what he might have been actually seeing was the decline of Prog Rock around 1978), and was at odds with Bruford and Wetton, who were rocking out too hard on stage, a cardinal sin in the Prog world, seemingly.

Now, while this may sound slightly similar to a story reported on yesterday, the decline of King Crimson was actually not necessarily a bad thing, because Red is a fantastic album. Instead of two albums’ worth of half-nonsense, the entire album is contained within 5 tracks, all of which contain some of the best elements of the Crimson sound up to that point, without so much of that pesky avant-garde filler that would sometimes take up entire albums (see: Lizard). This could be said to be influenced somewhat by Fripp’s lack of asserting control over the whole thing, leaving a lot of the production work to Bruford and Wetton, who just shrugged and proceeded made the thing rock.

It starts out with an aptly-named instrumental called “Red”, which uses a “whole-tone scale”, a scale so secret that I dare not try and describe it to you. Basically, it sounds a little bit like a standard song, if that song was right around the corner waiting to kill you. Yeah, the song has this crazy dissonance to it that kind of gives it a creepy effect, but various changes in the structure put things back in the proper “rock” category, and then of course there’s a section for cellos, possibly included to signal the approach of wild bears.

“Fallen Angel” brings up the end of the album’s first half, and is the first song on the album to feature lyrics. These lyrics are pretty dire, about the death of the singer’s little brother who tried to follow in the singer’s footsteps (or motorcycle tracks, as apparently the “Angel” is meant to mean the “Hell’s Angels”). Moreso than the death of an idiot, what might bring a tear to your eye about this song is that it’s the final one to include the poor acoustic guitar, as Fripp would eventually burn all of his acoustic guitars and only use electric ones from there on out. What’s next, burning all the mellotrons too?

The album’s centerpiece is another song that sounds like it wants to murder you, this one going by the name of “One More Red Nightmare”. Still, this song is immensly fun, with a very strong vocal performance from Wetton, and some of the catchier drum sounds to come out of Bruford in this period, at least in my ears.

The next song is “Providence”, named after the Rhode Island town in which the song was performed (mostly via improvisation) live. This song features David Cross’ violin opening the thing before it starts to go off into this “little bits of instruments coming in and playing random noise” series of tangents that could sound like a brilliant piece of musical art, but most days of the week winds up sounding a bit like a “shreds video“. Really though, I do like the song, especially when the beat comes in and the whole thing sort of comes together.

Then finally, we get a song “Starless”, which might confuse some people since it contains the lyric “Starless and Bible black”, which is the name of the previous album, which has a song with the same title. I’m still not quite clear on this one myself, apparently they wrote the song for the previous album, but scrapped it in favor of a 9 minute instrumental that’s still pretty good, and then decided to put the song on their next album in its full form? Either way, this song is my favorite vocal melody of all 3 songs on this album that contain vocals, and the inclusion of some of the Islands players give this song a very “original King Crimson” sound, which is always a good sound to have.

Of course, this extremely strong set of songs wasn’t enough to hold the band together. If anything, this album’s greatness was just a coincidence. Fripp wound up disbanding the King Crimson before this album was even released, and famously remarked that the band was “completely over for ever and ever.” It turns out that “for ever and ever” is more like a few years, as the band would bounce back with an all new sound and cast in the 80′s, but we’ll have to get into that another day. Until then!

King Crimson – Islands

I was warned about Islands. Ever since I went on a bit of a collection spree with King Crimson, whose albums Larks’ Tongue In Aspic and In The Court Of The Crimson King intrigued me so. The albums made in the band’s unstable time between, oh who am I kidding, they’ve always been unstable. Either way, I was told to avoid this and the nearby album Lizard while I’m at it.

Well, I didn’t listen to any advice on the matter, and now Islands one of my favorite Crimson albums. Eat that, logic and reason:

I am going to stop short of saying this album is “unique” among King Crimson’s catalogue, because really “unique” kind of goes hand-in-hand with this band. For goodness’ sakes, in the 90′s they toured as a “double trio” with two guitarists, two bassists, and two drummers. In this particular instance, however, they have a different drummer who was only there for this album (who himself replaced a one-album drummer who played on Lizard), and a new bassist/vocalist.

Interestingly, I’m pretty sure that Robert Fripp didn’t really intend for all his singers to also play bass, it’s about half-coincidence that a few of them did. Indeed, the idea to teach new vocalist Boz Burrell how to play the bass in order to be the bassist/vocalist for King Crimson arose more out of not being able to find an actual bassist. Why not? It worked twice before!

Indeed, Boz Burrell made a fine bassist, and in fact his bassy contributions to this album are among my favorite parts of Islands. Perhaps because he suffered from New Guy Syndrome, where he played the parts with an especially large amount of care because he was kind of new at the whole bass thing, or maybe he was just naturally good, or maybe, and this is the most likely scenario, Robert Fripp was such a hard-ass about things that Burrell was just trained extremely well in the short time allotted. Either way, Burrell did so well on the bass that, upon leaving King Crimson directly after this album, he went on to be the bassist for Bad Company, a gig which lasted him the rest of his life, which unfortunately came to an end a couple of years ago.

Boz Burrell was an interesting addition to the group, now that I’ve read up on him a bit. He had some really crazy near-brushes with success; he once auditioned to be the replacement for Roger Daltry when The Who was planning on firing him, and was only thwarted by the fact that they didn’t. He also had a brief solo career wherein he was joined by Ritchie Blackmore, who was just about to start Deep Purple at the time, though he wasn’t asked to join or anything. I guess he would just have to settle for being a member of King Crimson for a while.

Anyways, the actual Islands album is a funny old thing. It starts with a crazy, pounding cello arrangement, which doesn’t seem to just be a trick of the Mellotron, as it has some real scratchy bowing bits that I don’t think were a feature of that particular instrument, but who knows. There is a “double bass” player mentioned in the liner notes. The lyrics to “Formentera Lady” are a poetic thing, mainly describing scenery, and seem to be drawn from The Odyssey by Homer. I’m not entirely sure about this, because I haven’t read the book, but Odysseus makes an appearance, so good enough!

The song is about 10 minutes long and, like most of the album, doesn’t really utilize that much air space “efficiently”, spending in fact the first 2 minutes of the song just noodling around that cello and an oboe. Still, there are at least several minutes’ worth of good music to be heard here, mainly held together by Boz’s solid bass-line (which I believe is just one note throughout) and Ian Wallace’s steady drumming. After the song proper is over, there is more noodling, but this time with all instruments involved aside from the monotone bass (though it does occasionally get a nice fill here and there), and apparently soprano singing from a guest vocalist. Really I wonder if that person got paid for that kind of singing.

The real highlight of the album for me is the second song, “Sailor’s Tale”, which starts right at the end of the previous song with a cymbal hit that is soon fully realized as this wonderful tripping beat complete with a high-octave bass-line that together is just heavenly. The main instrumentation for the first part of the song seems to be Mellotron and saxophones. After that, the electric guitar is pounded upon and the rest of the song slows down to accommodate. Once the instrumentation comes back in and reaches a swell, it starts to switch from major key to minor key in a mode may start to sound familiar to a few of you. Why yes, that is almost exactly the kind of thing Radiohead did for their song “The National Anthem”, this song always seems to me like a 30 year predecessor to Radiohead’s horn-tastic jam. I’d be real hard-pressed to pick a favorite of the two, though.

Anyways, we return to the world of vocals with two tracks that are good but lyrically disturbing. The first is “The Letters”, which features words that I hate to hear in song, one of which is “flesh”, and the context doesn’t help any either:

With quill and silver knife
She carved a poison pen
Wrote to her lover’s wife:
“Your husband’s seed has fed my flesh”

Yeah no thanks. Anyway I don’t want to spoil the ending for you but let’s just say stuff gets melancholy from there. The instrumentation is quite good on this track, however. Even better is the weird bluesy creep-tastic “Ladies Of The Road”, which has a pounding beat in some obscure time signature, Boz singing the touching lyrics in a style that I suppose best demonstrates, in his brief tenure with King Crimson, why he almost replaced one of the most legendary voices in rock music. The lyrics are too naughty to reprint, so I’ll just say it’s a song about the Rock N’ Roll lifestyle, ironically written by a guy (Peter Sinfield) who wasn’t actually in the group (and thus, out on the road) except to write lyrics.

The album then spends about 20 more minutes fading out. Ok, not really, but this is definitely where about 90% of the potential audience for such an album may scratch their heads and eventually wander away. Basically, you’ve got “Prelude: Song Of The Gulls”, which is a classical-flavored instrumental of a humble 4 minute length, and then the title track, which is about a 3 minute song stretched out to nearly 10 minutes by piano-laden classical pieces that people kindly describe as “meditative” and perhaps more bluntly describe as “boring and also boring”. Personally, I grew up on classical music, and in fact I love sparse arrangements, so this is my favorite part of the album, besides the rocking bits.

That is the thing, in order to enjoy Islands, one has to appreciate both rocking bits and slow-as-Christmas bits, because they’re both in top form on this album, and if you took both bits away, all you’re left with is creepy Boz Burrell singing about seducing highschool-age female rock fans. You might as well listen to Motörhead if you want that.

King Crimson – Larks’ Tongues In Aspic

So I have resisted the urge to write about Poor Old Lu’s Straight Six EP, which I count among my favorite albums, because it’s only got 6 songs, but here I am today talking about an album with “only” 6 songs. The difference is this album is a full 47 minute-long album with 5 songs going over the 7 minute mark. Yep, this is a Progressive Rock album all right, and it don’t get more Prog than King Crimson:

A hallmark of Progressive Rock is that it is rooted in complexity. While arguably the most complex band that fits into this genre would be Gentle Giant, it’s because they concentrated all of their efforts on the complexity of the actual music. King Crimson, not to be out-done, apparently chose to focus their powers of convolution into the lineup of the band. They’re a bit like Deep Purple in that respect, only Deep Purple doesn’t have to have a color-coded chart detailing the various lineup changes (see the King Crimson Wikipedia page), but both bands have a constant member that has kept the whole thing from falling apart. For King Crimson, that man is Robert Fripp.

Robert Fripp, on top of being the reason any of us have our precious Tools and Mars Voltas and Primus, due to his magically confusing approach to making music, also had some very interesting methods of choosing bandmates when his old ones went bad.

For this particular lineup, the “third” lineup, he decided to exchange his bassist/vocalist for… another bassist/vocalist (where do they find these guys? I have been playing bass and singing for like 12 years but can not do both at the same time). He also added two members, a violinist named David Cross (presumably no relation to the standup comedian) and James Muir, a percussionist, which would mark the first of many times King Crimson would have two people playing the bangy instruments at the same time.

Fripp also enlisted Supertramp guitarist (yes, you heard me, Supertramp) Richard Palmer James to write lyrics for him… through the mail. This strikes me as one of the strangest ideas I’ve ever heard, and yet it’s so simple! Can’t write words? Just get a friend to send you some lyrics they might have lying around! Of course, the best part is this isn’t even a unique thing, Richard was the replacement non-playing lyricist for the band.

With this new-found set of musicians (and lyricist) would come a new-found idea: just play whatever the hell you want and damn the running time! Sure they had a lyricist now and he was, at least in this writer’s opinion, quite a competent one, only three of the 6 monstrous songs on this album have any words. They’re all as close to the middle of the album as you can get, and in order to get to them, first we have to get through the 1st part of the title track, a staggering 14 minute long instrumental.

The best part about “Larks’ Tongues In Aspic, Part One” is that it’s the first of 4 parts the band would write through the years. The first two parts bookend this album, and the first part takes its sweet time actually starting. It begins with James Muir tinkering with all kinds of percussion that actually sounds really pleasant at first, and then it shimmers a bit with what sounds like one of those metal-rod contraptions being run through a delay pedal, giving the effect of sounding like a million clocks, and then the violins come in with a dramatic staccato line, and then what I can only describe visually as the rock guitars coming in like a giant monster and knocking over all the clocks commences. Yeah, after about 3 1/2 minutes, the song decides to completely melt your face off, and don’t you feel like you earned it?

The song’s not done there, of course, after the lumbering beast of heavy rock rears its head and tears through the proceedings again, we get this incredible funk portion with free-form bass and guitar solos for all! After that, around the 6 minute mark, we get more bass solo, but this time distorted and awesome and there are noisy, crazy percussions all over the place. I tell ya, this instrumental is the jam for at least half its length.

Then the whole song fades out into wind as the lone violin plays a nice soliloquoy occasionally backed up by the tinkly percussion… for practically the rest of the song. It takes about from the 8 minute mark to the 11 1/2 minute mark to bring the rest of the instruments back in, and even then it sounds like the rest of the band had been enjoying an old movie that you can hear in the background (not well enough that one can understand it, of course). The whole thing builds up to a bit of a climax that apparently refers to a Vaughn Williams piece, but I’m not too familiar with Mr. Williams, having only one album of his works, so I’ll just have to take Dr. Wikipedia’s word for it.

It’s either a thing of humor or mercy for the band to not only treat us to a 2 1/2 minute long song (with lyrics!) after that epic struggle, but it’s also a pleasant song. “Book Of Saturday” has a curious line in it, “And I swear I like your people, the boys in the band”. Gentle Giant released their Octopus album 3 months prior to this one, and it has an instrumental track called “The Boys In The Band”. I don’t know, maybe it’s just me being crazy, though the two bands have been inextricably linked together by the prog community for years (in fact, I’d say the only singer that sounds close to Derek Shulman is King Crimson’s then-new bassist/vocalist John Wetton), so who knows?

I hope you have enjoyed that one and only reprieve from lengthy songs, because they’re all over the 7 minute mark from here. “Exiles” is a lyrically vague song featuring the Mellotron, one of music’s coolest extinct instruments. It’s also about the closest song to “old” King Crimson I can think of, with a melody that evokes a little bit of In The Court Of The Crimson King. Still, the song only hangs on the “this is a song” idea for a little while, as the impossibly low notes of the mellotron kick back in menacingly for a while, as if to loom over the actual pleasant acoustic number like some oppressive force of evil. I like a little oppressive force of evil in my music.

“Easy Money” is, in parts, a sludgy metal song, with a rhythmic sound that literally sounds like boots sloshing in mud in the background, that kind of throws a kitchen sink’s worth of gadgets and random instruments and non-instruments into the mix. The vocals are emphasized by noises such as a packet of crackers being destroyed under  the line “my heart would break” and when he sings the word “snake”, of course a snake hisses. Anyway the sounds get more ribald from there, as it becomes apparent that this is a song about a prostitute (I guess), so the best part of the song is where Wetton sings “Easy Money” and you hear the “Boi-oi-oi-oi-oing” thing, heh heh heh…

“The Talking Drum”, the penultimate track, features some interesting sounds, but all I really want to say about it is that the whole song amounts to the longest crescendo (that is, musical tension-building) I have ever heard outside of Classical music. Starting with finger-percussion and wind noises and ultimately ending up with an army of squealing noises and just general chaos. I really have to commend ol’ Frippy for his ability to really mess with people who are already used to being messed with in music.

Finally, we’re given the much more consistently heavy-hitting “Part Two” of the title track. On top of the chunky guitar and bass parts, toward the end of the song we’re given a violin part that does nothing but raise pitch so high that you stop hearing it at one point and any dogs in the room will invariably start barking. That’s rock n’ roll, well in a very nerdy and convoluted way.

Phew, hardly any band takes it out of me like King Crimson, I had to listen to this album 4 consecutive times just today to get all the parts straight in my head, and I’ve been listening to this album for over a year now. Still, that kind of musical density and confusion is what I go for, and maybe I’ll get to tackle some of the band’s other adventures before the year is out. Until then!

King Crimson – In The Court Of The Crimson King

Well, it should appear as no surprise to anyone who has read my Gentle Giant writeups that I am a bit of a fan of progressive rock music. But what choice did I have? I grew up on a mix of classical music and blues and never really liked “standard” rock music until well into my teen years, I mainly played RPG video games made in the 80′s and 90′s (most of which feature soundtracks inspired by prog)*, and I’m a bit of a nerd with a taste for that which is complicated and weird. Besides the fact that I dislike the idea of growing my hair out and smoking weed, I am pretty much the perfect candidate for it.

I didn’t want to put that idea out there immediately, though, so I decided to wait until roughly 100 entries in to start talking about the bands that really matter, that way I can lose readers instead of the much worse not having any at all. So where did this “progressive rock” thing begin? According to many major sources, it’s right here, baby:

King Crimson, on top of being one of the first “progressive rock” acts of the oh-so-1960′s-and-70′s, are the first band besides Gentle Giant I ever heard in my tender late teens that would dare to create music that explores classical, weird, and complicated territory, and of course I loved them for it. Unlike Gentle Giant, however, King Crimson is a rather hard band to follow, in more ways than one. Much like Deep Purple or really most other prog acts, they had multiple line-up changes and it’s always hard for me to keep up with those. Also, King Crimson’s music is orchestrated, sure, but Gentle Giant’s method of orchestrating their nonsense is through extremely tight-knit and intentional movements that keep the songs short and punchy but still painfully technical and precise. King Crimson’s method is to confuse you with seemingly random bits of everything that sometimes doesn’t go anywhere, but when it does, it’s worth the trip.

Even if you’re a fan of standard music, you should at least commit 7 and 1/2 minutes of your time to enjoying “21st Century Schizoid Man”, the album’s opening track. It’s perhaps the most sensible and seemingly well-thought-out track, with an oppressive hook that gives the song a nice audacious feel to it, at least for the first bit. The first “proggy” move of the song is where it suddenly speeds up in tempo and changes completely and throws a saxophone solo at you. This isn’t cheese sax, however, it’s treated much like a breathier version of the guitar, which is also being thrown at you. You might need a helmet. Apparently this middle instrumental section has its own name, “Mirrors”, but soon artists figured out that you can change your song in the middle of a song and not have to change the name. Or you can be like Radiohead and name each song twice just because you’re pretentious.

Anyway, also in this middle section is a section where the very rapid beat is followed really closely by a fast bass-line and other instruments and they play a standard 12 bar blues line, but in a really strange timing, to wonderful effect. I think it was this point of the song that truly won my young heart over to King Crimson.

By the time 6 minutes has passed, you might have forgotten there are words in this song, words about how evil politicians (particularly Sprio Agnew) are, but the words really are quite sparse so I’ll forgive you for forgetting them.

The next song, as well as the other ones, really slow the album down, but since the slowdown happens at track 2, you really can’t call it Late Album Slowdown, I guess a more accurate condition this album has (but doesn’t “suffer” from) is Early Album Speedup, a rare condition where the first song is really rockin’ (well, as close as prog gets), but the rest of the album is really slow and meandering (see also Jet’s Get Born, the 60′s-throwback album that stops being good right after the radio hit).

“I Talk To The Wind” is not a bad song, however. It’s got a wonderful chord progression and, even better, a really fussy little beat that taps away in the background and kind of goes all over the place, but isn’t nearly as audacious about it. The song is actually really folky, what with a flute being played throughout, and though there are no acoustic guitars, the electric guitar (unless that’s a mellotron like in the first song, stupid bad mixing) is really subdued and the flute combined with the vocal harmonies carry the song through its 6 minutes of peace.

In fact, I really want to check out the new remaster of this album that was released about 5 years ago (though apparently a 40th anniversary edition is being planned for this year, which I might hold out for), because the version I have is the terrible “bad tapes” version. Apparently the original master tapes were all lost at some point, and the only tapes that made it onto the original CD pressings all had to be dug out of a landfill that had recently been hit by a tornado. The process of mastering them onto CD involved playing the tapes on a boom box across the room from a microphone connected to the CD recorder. Unconventional, sure, but it assured the listener absolute inaccessibility to what’s really going on in the mix. Apparently the real tapes were found and proper issues have been released, I’m just too lazy to order them at this point and Zune doesn’t have them.

Oh right, the album. We’re now at track 3, which is “Epitaph” and apparently contains two other songs within it, but again I am not going to pay particular attention to these. This one makes good use of the mellotron’s fake strings, and some very pretentious lyrics. Well, it would be redundant to call progressive rock lyrics “pretentious”, besides which I actually like them a lot, so there. The fake strings of a mellotron should be a fairly recognizable sound to kids like me who watched all the terrible heavy-handed cartoon movies they had in the 70′s and 80′s (I haven’t seen The Last Unicorn lately but I keep picturing it in my head while listening to this stuff, though I know their band was America). It’s definitely a “sound of the time”, and worth revisiting, especially if you weren’t there in the first place and thus haven’t wrecked your mind with drugs, you damnable hippy.

Actually, I think the song does change at about 4 minutes in, I suppose that’s “March For No Reason”, or maybe we’re already at “Tomorrow And Tomorrow”. Oh well, the flutes are in and the acoustic guitar is playing some very heavy chords. It goes back to the original melody, however, so I don’t really know that anything special is going on here besides a really good 9 minute long song about nightmares and bad things.

We then have the 12-minute long “Moonchild”, which starts out as a “more of the same” track with an interesting melody, but then shit goes bananas. Specifically, the band starts a free-form jazz experiment that, like most experiments, kind of fails to yield any reasonable results. I appreciate experimentation, to be sure, but I kind of like my experimental music bits to be a little “busier”. In fact, the entire last 10 minutes of this song stay just above silence as far as presence is concerned. This part of the album would surely be the final obstacle to overcome by a novice of the Progressive Rock sound before becoming a true fan, whereas the rest of us will thank the heavens there is a skip button on cd/mp3 players.

Finally, we have “The Court Of The Crimson King”, which, along with “21st Century Schizoid Man”, kind of bookends the album with two songs that actually have discernable and very catchy melodies. I don’t know if “catchy” is an important enough saying to attach to this song, as it is a very epic song indeed. It is, in fact, a song that does not end easily, it fades in and out quite a few times, once even ending entirely except for a flutey, almost cartoony reprise before coming back in with its full orchestral sound. It’s really impossible to listen to this song and not think of the 70′s for me. I know I wasn’t around at that time, but this is pretty much how I picture it. Oh to be my dad’s age, then again that would mean my entire online presence would be maintaining some kind of geocities progressive rock website to this day. Oh no!

So there we have it, the 1st “Progressive Rock” album but a very interesting band indeed. To deny King Crimson’s influence in the interesting, slightly obscure, and musically fussy music the counter-culture kids enjoy today would be like denying that The Beatles had any influence on popular music. You’d be ludicrous for saying, but I respect your boldness. Of course, I could be wrong in all this, but I enjoy plenty of time on both sides of the popular music fence, even if it’s more fun and much sleepier over on this side. I shall hopefully be talking about King Crimson some more later, especially their much, much better albums than this one, but that’s another entry for another day here on “Album Du Jour”, where we (the editorial) fashion a new 1000+ word writeup on those albums we love so very much every single lovin’ day. Good night!

*Ok, ok, ok, I’m still playing these games, but what do you expect? They’re incredibly long and I don’t have all day for them.