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King Crimson’s 3rd Observation: Lizard

January 27, 2018 //
5

Island Records, 1970

Released only six months after In the Wake of Poseidon (and only 14 months after their debut), Lizard is a definite continuation of the improvisational jazz/rock found on the first two LPs. Almost all of the vocal work has been taken on by Gordon Haskell (whose voice graced the released version of Cadence and Cascade on Poseidon). One of the main changes in sound is the full-time presence of Mel Collins on flute and sax. Lyric duties are still being handled by Pete Sinfield.

In rough structure, we get three uptempo songs on side 1 followed by a ballad. Side 2 consists of the multi-part Lizard Suite. The first thing to catch is that the more rocking of the songs don’t really resemble much from the previous albums, except for the maybe the jazz inflections of Cat Food.

At a finer level, there seems to be both a lyrical and a musical plan to the whole thing. Almost, but not quite, a concept album in much the same way that Court seemed to follow an interlocking plan, but wasn’t a single story carried through.

Cirkus musically feels on the one hand like four verses in search of a chorus, until the crashing cadences of the first three verses cross-fade into a soprano sax and Mellotron-led bridge that feel more a part of some AM radio soft rock hit. This doesn’t last. The fourth verse collapses into a crash of noise which evolves through several phases and concludes with what sounds perhaps like the ‘megaphonium fanfare’ referenced in the second verse.

Indoor Games feels much the same as Cirkus, both musically and in terms of wild lyrics that come from all over the place and might reflect how a writer who has never taken psychedelics might script a trip: ‘One string puppet shows amuse / Your sycophantic friends…Whilst you loaf on your sofa / Sporting falsies and a toga-Playing Indoor Games’.

Happy Family features Haskell’s voice run through a vocoder most of the time (in the second and third verses sounding almost like a dalek), arrayed against some flute and organ. Some of the instrumentation again brings the midway to mind. The bridge is again a controlled madness of improvisation, anchored primarily by Collins’ flute work.

Lyrically, we hear of four men, Uncle Rufus, Brother Judas, Cousin Silas, Nasty Jonah, who grow rich (whipped the world and beat the clock / wound up with their share of stock), perform (Uncle Rufus grew his nose / threw away his circus clothes), and presumably go to war. Four times the lyrics repeat ‘four went on (or ‘by’ in the first verse) and none came back’. Thematically, this points backwards to the opening track and forward to the Battle of Glass Tears, again suggesting that perhaps there’s a plan in all this madness.

Side 1 closes with Lady of the Dancing Water which at less than three minutes and only ten lines, is the shortest of of the tracks on Lizard. It also seems the most like the easy folk Haskell would do a couple of years later. Lovely as it is, Lady doesn’t seem to fit with anything else on the album. On the other hand, it’s not as though a little respite doesn’t add poignancy to the proceedings.

KingCrimson-Lizard-backRight then. On to side 2, the Lizard Suite.

The first section, Prince Rupert Awakes, features an unadorned and untreated vocal from Jon Anderson of Yes, which also sounds like he’s handling his own harmonies. Before getting into the lyrics and the structure of the piece, I’ve got to say that this must have been particularly galling to Haskell, who cited his treated vocals as one of the reasons he left KC following this album. Haskell at the time had a strong voice, though not one with much expressed range. (His 1974 album It Is and It Isn’t features some lovely work, such as this piece.)

Lyrically, it’s more Pete Sinfield mush, but there’s a wonderful contrast between the verses in which the vocals play against dissonant instrumentation – piano in one channel and bells and synth flourishes in the other, while the choruses feature almost Spanish-style guitar runs and Mellotron.

The suite continues with Bolero – The Peacock’s Tale, which is a nice little pun that references the last verse of the opening, ‘Now tales Prince Rupert’s peacock brings / Of walls and trumpets thousand fold’. It’s an interesting instrumental that I suppose is mostly a jazz battle between pianist Keith Tippet and Collins. The bolero sounds like it’s closing about a minute before it should, and the the flute rises in a crescendo joined by a quieter piano accompaniment and finally kettle drums. The Battle of Glass Tears, the third part of the suite, is itself divided into three parts. The name of this section again draws from Prince Rupert Awakes, in which ‘Prince Rupert’s tears of glass / Make saffron sabbath eyelids bleed’. Dawn Song, a vocal, describes armies preparing themselves for battle, ‘Three hills apart great armies stir / Spit oath and curse as day breaks. / Forming lines of horse and steel / By even yards march forward.

It’s interesting to note that with Mel Collins’ 2015 return to active service in King Crimson, Cirkus and The Battle of Glass Tears (along with Pictures of a City from the last album, and The Letters from the next one) have become regular features of the band’s live sets.

With the lyrics to hand, the plan behind the whole thing seems obvious. The first verse of Cirkus concludes ‘Bid me face the east closed me in questions / Built the sky for my dawn’, suggesting that perhaps the battle is just another aspect of a cosmic ringmaster’s production.

Fairly straightforward, the aptly titled Last Skirmish finds the band at its most dissonant. Prince Rupert’s Lament builds a high wail from the guitar balanced against metronomic notes from Haskell’s bass.

In true King Crimson style, the album doesn’t end on this note of despair. Big Top, which sounds like a demented fun fair carousel committed to tape, slowed and sped up, fades out in just over a minute. When the album is played on repeat, it feels as though it really is a circular experience as Cirkus starts up again.

It’s possible I had this album during my 90s period of KC fascination, but there was nothing for me to grab on to – it was far too late for my prog-bound adolescence on the one hand and the jazz and improvisation didn’t seem of a piece with anything else I knew in the rest of the work. That said, having listened to it at least once a day for the last week, it’s a strong offering and well worth checking out. (And because there don’t seem to be any live versions of songs from this album on YouTube, here’s an 8-bit rendition of Happy Family.)

Next up: Islands.

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Categories Jazz, rock and roll

In the Wake of Poseidon

January 20, 2018 //
2

Island/Atlantic/Vertigo Records, 1970
Produced by Robert Fripp and Pete Sinfield

The first of many massive personnel changes in the Crimson camp occurred when Greg Lake met Keith Emerson at a King Crimson/The Nice double bill at the Fillmore in San Francisco in December, 1969. After that show and Emerson and Lake decided to hook up and with Carl Palmer and they recorded their first album the following summer. Wikipedia is not helpful in explaining why Ian MacDonald and Michael Giles left the band after that American tour as well, but even with all of these changes, Poseidon remains an even more cohesive album (IMVHO) than Court. Part of the reason is that Pete Sinfield is still handling lyrics, Lake sings on all but one of the album’s vocal tracks, and McDonald cowrote two tracks, the single Cat Food and side 2’s epic instrumental The Devil’s Triangle.

The album is bookended with three parts of a song called Peace – A Beginning opens side 1; A Theme and An End open and close side 2. The second tracks on each side are the two straight up rockers, Pictures of a City and the single Cat Food, and the album is rounded out with a couple of more progressive propositions.

Pictures of a City evolved out of A Man, A City, performed on the Crimson King tour and found in multiple versions on the Epitaph collection of those 1969 concerts. Musically it’s roped in from the clatter of those early performances into something a bit tighter. In the earlier versions, there’s room for a sax solo, and some stretched out interplay between the musicians. On the studio album, it’s a distinctly less free (as in jazz, not beer) proposition.

Side 1 continues with the thinly arranged ballad Cadence and Cascade, sung on the album by Gordon Haskell, but for which there’s a Greg Lake vocal version included as a bonus track on later releases. The sparse arrangement keeps the instruments from tripping over/crashing into one another, but leaves room for the individuality of the guitar and a sweet flute solo from Mel Collins. On the other hand, Haskell’s voice really doesn’t do the song justice – he doesn’t hit the high notes or master the low notes the way Lake did.

king-crimson-wake-jpThe title track closes out side 1. I think the band was going for something like Epitaph – musically, the song has the flow and drama of the earlier song with those smooth mellotron lines connecting the piece together. Lyrically however, it’s one of those songs that (and I paraphrase mellotron master Mike Dickson – I just can’t find the source – it’s in the notes for one of the songs on mellotronworks II) make prog rock fans say, ‘I don’t listen for the lyrics’. Sinfield seems to be after the grandeur of the drama between heroes and rulers and peasants in war, but each stanza has multiple subjects, whereas in Epitaph, we had only a tortured ‘I’ to give the song its emotional weight. The song is crushed under the weight of Bishop’s kings, Harvest hags, Heroes, Magi, and Harlequins.

After the resonant acoustic solo of Peace – A Theme, Cat Food roars in. More jazz than progressive, this was the song that grabbed me most when I first listened to this album in the 90s. My emotional response was to the weird, almost new wave instrumentation. The piano lines are reminiscent of the work Mike Garson was doing with David Bowie at the time with that right-hand madness. I’m not surprised the label used it for the single – it’s the tightest of the songs and the vocals are clear and mostly untreated. On the other hand, it’s the most unrepresentative song of the early work. (Listening now, I’m surprised it didn’t return to active service in the Adrian Belew years – it has some of his offbeat humour, both musically and lyrically.)

The Devil’s Triangle is a proper three-part instrumental epic which fades into some long mellotron chords, adds martial drums and some other stuff. The third part of the song (‘The Garden of Worm’) is very neatly separated from the previous section by a wind effect that fades to silence. The same martial drums are accompanied by whistles maybe and then a harpsichord shows up. Describing a song like this is very much in the ‘dancing about architecture’ category. Some bits are jazz, and some bits are just noise, and it’s mostly unlike anything else except when the occasional chord points out that this band evolved from Giles Giles and Fripp and another segment repeats a piece of the previous LP’s title track. Just for a moment, those Ah-ah-ahs show up, before Peace – An End. I hear the thematic reason for having the three parts of Peace show up evenly placed on the album, but the a cappella intro is almost as jarring to the ear as the opening chord of Pictures of a City after Peace – A Beginning. It might be done on purpose, but it doesn’t make for consistent listening, not that I’m asking for consistent listening from King Crimson. Honest!)

Overall, I give it a solid four stars. Next up? Lizard.

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Categories Music, Rock

In the Court of the Crimson King

January 20, 2018 //
0

Island Records/Atlantic Records 1969 Produced by King Crimsonking-crimson-in-the-court-of-the-crimson-king-4-ab
The signal blast that opens this album’s opening track, 21st Century Schizoid Man, is the announcement that there may still be insanity in the Fripp camp, but it is not cheerful. The improvisational center of the song with its nearly uncontrolled horns lays it out, as do the sections in which the time signatures shift without seeming to hint at any plan before roping it all back in. Fripp and company (this time Michael Giles, Greg Lake, Ian MacDonald, and lyrics by Pete Sinfield) are engaging in what sounds like a proto-fusion jazz experiment.
And almost as soon as it starts, it’s over.
The new recording of I Talk to the Wind, more reliant on the flute than on the Judy Dyble / GGF version recorded the previous year, is more complex and more controlled. The interplay of the instruments hints at the band’s wider ambitions than the silliness found on Cheerful Insanity.
Following the proto-jazz metal of Schizoid Man, this song’s pastoral arrangement is unexpected, but it’s thematically of a piece with the opener. The alienation of Schizoid Man’s last verse ‘Blind man’s greed / Poets starving, children bleed / Nothing he’s got he really needs’ dovetails with ‘On the outside, looking inside, what do I see / Much confusion, disillusion, all around me’. Just because it’s sung clearly with pleasing music doesn’t mean it’s not the same character.
There’s an argument to be made that the opener is an id-driven, gut-level response to the times and to the madness of the world in general. It’s the only musically heavy track on the album and a strange thing to open an otherwise soft album with. But in the sense of the album, it’s perfect. The first listeners must have been struck by the contrast between Schizoid Man’s coda and the opening of I Talk to the Wind, but, again, the themes of the album are supported by its calm. The emotional response to the world’s insanity, when articulated to communicate woe, is lost on the world. ‘My words are all carried away…the wind cannot hear.’ The pun of having a wind instrument carry the song wouldn’t be worth the bother if the song didn’t hold together. (Question though: Can someone sing the lyrics to Pete Shelley’s Homosapien to the tune of this song? ‘Said the shy boy to the coy boy…’ This would amuse me greatly.)
Epitaph, which closes side 1, is the album’s fulcrum and thematic and musical heart. Our narrator looking at the world and seeing its fate ‘is in the hands of fools’ sounds eerily timely. Balancing the possibility of survival (‘If we make it, we can all sit back and laugh’) with an honest assessment of the possibility of destruction (‘Yes I fear tomorrow I’ll be crying’), we know from the title where the song things the scales will fall.
Side 2’s first track, Moonchild, opens with a folk song subtitled The Dream, which after a couple of minutes slips into several minutes of nothing much, for want of a a more articulate reaction. Subtitled ‘The Illusion’, this is the least interesting stretch of music, possibly in the entire KC canon. It’s almost a surprise to hear the opening notes of the album’s title track which follows. I find this a little sad, because the lyric portion of the song is so beautiful.
Finally, In the Court of the Crimson King. The album’s title track has a weird structure moves from folky to jazzy to full on progressive before we knew what that meant. The lyrics about fire witches and puppets might indicate that the schizoid man has finally gone from close to the edge to over it and possibly towards peace in his own head. Musically the band is still playing games with both rock and roll and free improvisational jazz, while taking what it needs from the folk and classical traditions that were the wellspring of the UK progressive sound. The Dance of the Puppets, which takes us through the last two minutes of the album presents a strange coda which only in the last moments pulls back into the song’s musical theme.

Next up: In the Wake of Poseidon.

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Categories Music, Rock, rock and roll

The Cheerful Insanity of Giles, Giles and Fripp

January 7, 2018 //
0

So this month, I’ll be diving into the studio recordings of King Crimson. I’ve been a fan since the early 80s and have seen them perform four times. (I’ll see them again in July. Woot!) I considered reviewing the albums alphabetically rather than chronologically, but was dissuaded.

While Robert Fripp is the only constant in almost 50 years of KC, both Giles brothers appeared on either or both of the first two KC albums.

There are two ways to consider this album, neither of them very useful. One way is to look for aspects of it that point to what Michael Giles and Robert Fripp would do the following year with In the Court of the Crimson King. The fact is that very little of Cheerful Insanity resembles anything in the first few years of KC. The other way to look at is to consider where it falls in the music being made at the same time. This is more helpful, I suppose, because there are bits of the album that resemble early Moody Blues, early Pink Floyd, generic English folk rock and its proggy offspring (Genesis, Jethro Tull, Yes).

I first heard this album sometime in the mid-90s when I was collecting as best I could anything with Fripp’s name on it. I couldn’t hear anything in it (and still don’t) that resembles the weirdness of that late-70s/early 80s period when he’d been applying that arpeggiating guitar technique to everything he touched (including, for example, the stylings of the first and third Roches LPs. And much as I enjoyed that early prog, Cheerful Insanity just didn’t cut it.

Part of the issue I had was that a very young Fripp only wrote three of the songs. Little Children on side A suggests why Fripp left the lyrics to others after that. This song is notable for vocals provided by The Breakaways who famously backed Petula Clark and Cilla Black on several singles.

GGFSuite No. 1 and Erudite Eyes, which close side B have a more Frippish feel to them than the rest of the album. Suite No. 1, which clocks in at just under six minutes, starts with some Paganini-like runs that are joined by bass and keyboard, but after a minute and a half or so, the baroque gymnastics are replaced with a piano/strings/vocals arrangement that brings to mind the Chi-Lites’ Have You Seen Her. This segment is followed by a harpsichord-guitar duet which is followed by a reprise of the Paganini. A single track broken into three possibly unrelated forms, pulled together by a reprise of the theme? The application of jazz theory to folk motifs is one of the main threads of early progressive rock – it’s just weird to hear it applied so strangely.

Erudite Eyes is really the only song that points to the musical strangeness that was to come. It begins as a waltz, turns into a polka, returns to waltz-time and moves into improvised psychedelic strangeness before the second minute is up.

Lyrically, the whole affair is pretty strange. Newly-Weds suggests the discord of couples keeping up with the Joneses (He worries all day about wolves at his door…but on the other hand, she’s got a ring). One In A Million’s look at a man ‘content with the things at the moment, except the yellow line by the pavement’ echoes Revolver-era Beatles (Eleanor Rigby, Taxman).

The biggest issue I have with the whole album is the interspersed comedic numbers. Most of the songs on side A are bookend with episodes of The Saga of Rodney Toady, a ‘sad young man’ who girls run away from at school dances and whose parents are ‘fat and ugly’ and tell him that will ‘meet a fat and ugly girl just like Rodney’s mother and they would get married.’ These interludes don’t speak back to the music and actually detract from enjoying the album.

Side B’s songs are interspersed with repetitions of the sentence ‘I know a man and his name is George’ spoken in the correct order once and then in permutations (Know I George his name and a man, for example) and in increasingly annoying voices. One could argue that the rearrangements of the words reflect the possibilities inherent in the structured and random mutations of music that lie at the heart of King Crimson’s most intriguing work (for me, this includes tracks like Fracture, Level 5, and Starless).

After this album was released, Peter Giles left, and Ian MacDonald and Judy Dyble (late of Fairport Convention) joined and they made a collection of high quality home recordings released in 2001 as The Brondesbury Tapes. This collection is mainly notable for Dyble’s vocal on an early version of I Talk to the Wind. Soon after, Greg Lake joined and the Crimson King was born.

 

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Categories Folk, Music, Rock, rock and roll

Sunn O))), Magma, Unsane

October 31, 2017 //
0

So Sunday night’s adventure (as you might have noticed) was the last three acts on the Southern Lord Records Fest at Melkweg, Magma, Unsane, and of course Sunn O))) (being the folks who started and run Southern Lord).

Magma are curious blend of jazz and hard progressive rock. Under various lineups that have only the constant of drummer Stephan Vander, they’ve been doing the work since 1970. Interesting and compelling stuff.

sunn_melkwegUnsane are one of these crews I wish I’d gotten into a long time ago. They’ve been on the circuit for almost 30 years. Hard and sludgy, Unsane have musical elements in common with early Nirvana and Big Black and to a lesser extend The Melvins. When you get folks who’ve been doing the work together for almost 25 years (the current line-up solidified in ’94), there’s a joy in hearing and watching them lock together. (Note to San Francisco / Bay Area friends: Unsane will be at Bottom of the Hill on 1st December. You should go.)

Sunn O))) are a different thing altogether. They perform more as ritual than as rock and roll. The fog, the volume, and the robes the band members wear contribute to this vibe. Vocalist Attila Csihar took center stage and, for want of a better word, intoned for about ten minutes to increasing volume and fog before the other band members (guitarists Stephen O’Malley and Greg Anderson, and two people working keyboards.) For all the flowing of the sound between the instruments and the vocalists, it seems to be a pretty tightly constructed set these days. (Alas, while I recognised various pieces, I couldn’t tell you what they’re titled.) I’ve seen them once before, at Paradiso on the Monoliths and Dimensions tour and the most interesting aspect of the gig was noticing a brass instrument on the stage and being afraid of what they might do with it. (The volume at a Sunn O))) is such that you both hear it and feel it in your bones.) I don’t recall that anyone did anything more than brandish it. There was a trombone stood next to one of the keyboardists, stage left, and it added a lovely counterpoint to one of the pieces. However, as with last night’s gig, I had to leave early not to be on the very slow train back to Leiden. One of these days I will witness one of their gigs to its conclusion. All in all, a great set.

Sadly, I rushed out in order to make my train and didn’t stop at Unsane’s merch counter at all. And I didn’t have my wits about me at Sunn O)))’s. I bought a t-shirt and a vinyl copy of Kannon (their very beautiful 2015 release). I should also have bought a vinyl copy of the 2008 live album Domkirke.

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Categories Rock
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