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No mad video machines – King Crimson’s Beat

March 10, 2018 //
1

E’G/Warner Bros., 1982

I’m honestly not sure what to make of this album as a whole. Beat has the same hard/weird/beautiful combination that we’ve come to know and love from King Crimson, but it also leans heavily on the New York sound of its predecessor. I first had this on CD in about 1987 and I recall listening to a few tracks a lot and not knowing what to do with others. I didn’t have a lot of King Crimson context, but loved Heartbeat when it was on the radio when I was in high school. I at least had a little to go on with Neal and Jack and Me. Two Hands is beautiful, but the instrumentals kind of baffled me. It might be the weakest of the early 80s trilogy and (at least according to Wikipedia) was difficult to make. Belew and Fripp went head to head and Fripp was ready to call it a day on this version of the Crims, but they got it together and toured (and recorded another album).

Discipline pointed at a thematic fascination with the Beat generation writers (The Sheltering Sky), and this album continues with it. Opener, Neal and Jack and Me namechecks Jack Kerouac and Neal Cassady in its title. While the lyrics seem to have the point of view of the cars the titular characters drove in On The Road, they could also be spoken by Carolyn Cassady, lover of both whose memoir Heart Beat was published in 1976. A film version was released in 1980.

Which brings us to track two, Heartbeat, which seems to be a love song or a lost-love song. For me it was an evocation of intertwined love and lust and made me want to be landed with someone, which I mostly wasn’t in high school and college. While band members have suggested that this track and side 2’s Two Hands shouldn’t have been on the album, they’re both quite beautiful. They’re just not really King Crimson songs. (Belew would rerecord Heartbeat for his 1990 solo album Young Lions, though I don’t recall that version being wildly different.)

Sartori in Tangier, the album’s first instrumental takes its title from both Kerouac’s Satori in Paris and the city of Tangier where many of the Beats lived, including Paul Bowles, author of the novel The Sheltering Sky. For being only three and a half minutes, it still has the structure of a Crimson multi-part epic. Tony Levin’s Chapman Stick into leads into a strange combination of downtown funk and middle eastern rhythms. Stick Men (Levin and Pat Mastelotto’s project with Markus Reuter) have been performing a version of this recently that works quite well.

Oh, and here’s a really intense rendition which (based on the opening still) is from a Japanese date on the Beat tour. Seems that the string battle is just between Levin and Fripp, because Belew is on percussion.

NC_HB_Germany_1980Side one closes out with Waiting Man, another distinctive Belew vocal which like the title track of the follow-up album seems to have the vocals in one time signature against instrumentation in another. Bill Bruford’s drumming on this piece (as with a lot of the percussion in this period of KC history) seems to owe a bit to Steve Reich’s phase works such as 1971’s Drumming.

Side 2 opens with Neurotica which is an odd combination of spoken word in the style of Thela Hun Ginjeet and something much jazzier. I find the vocal portion, which describes or lists animals roaming the city (heat in the jungle indeed) to be less interesting than the music.

Two Hands wraps a fairly sparse arrangement around a lyric by Belew’s then wife Margaret. The strange point of view (I am a face in the painting on the wall / I pose and shudder and watch them from the foot of the bed) gives the song this weird voyeurism. From one perspective, an outsider of sorts recognizes love in the pair he (she?) sees. From another, the narrator of the song is watching people he doesn’t necessarily know make love. Again, an odd addition to the Crimson catalog.

The Howler poises a generally funky bassline against some rather interesting noise in the service of a relatively abstract lyric. The band doesn’t seem to know quite what to do with it and the song fades out. I imagine that a few live workouts would have made the song more interesting.

The album closes with Requiem, an improvisation in which the members of the band seem to be playing at cross purposes. This isn’t uncommon in KC improvs, but the fadeout at the end seems to indicate that this was going to be the last song of this version of the band. Fripp pulled it together and they gathered for another tour and album.

Next up: Three Of A Perfect Pair.

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Categories 80s, Music, Rock

The More I Look At It, The More I Like It – King Crimson’s Discipline

March 6, 2018 //
2

E’G/Warner Bros., 1981

Released in 1981, Discipline was the first album by the reformed King Crimson after a seven-year hiatus. Prefigured by Robert Fripp’s 1980 LP League of Gentlemen, in the dead wax of which was inscribed The Next Step Is Discipline. The League of Gentlemen was an interesting exercise in angular new/no wave and featured Barry Andrews (at the time between XTC and Shriekback) and Sara Lee (who would go on to Gang of Four, the B-52s and a few other acts).

Fripp himself had spent the previous couple of years producing projects with Peter Gabriel (Scratch), Daryl Hall (Sacred Songs), and the Roches’ first album (and later their third) amongst others. Not to mention his own solo release, Exposure which included guest spots from those three and several others, including Peter Hammill.

The act Fripp was putting together after League was to be called Discipline, but at some point, he changed his mind and decided it would be the next incarnation of KC. As was the case with almost all previous releases, this album featured a new line-up. Bill Bruford returned from the mid-70s crew and was joined by Adrian Belew and Tony Levin.

Levin and Fripp had already worked together on Peter Gabriel’s first two solo albums. Belew and Fripp crossed paths on David Bowie’s Heroes – Fripp played guitar on the album, and Belew on the tour and Bowie’s next album, Lodger. Despite his work on the edges of rock and roll as a member of Frank Zappa’s band, Belew brought a distinctly pop sensibility to the proceedings. (On his 1983 solo album, there’s a cover of the Beatles’ I’m Down – he knows his power pop.)

devito_disciplineDiscipline runs the gamut from essentially downtown New York new wave to strangely beautiful downtempo work. Some pieces harken tot the noise mastered by the mid-70s line-up. What’s most interesting about this album (and its two successors) is that Fripp for the first time had a guitar foil in the band who was an equally forceful player. Belew also acted as frontman in a way the earlier singers (including Wetton and Lake) hadn’t. Belew never subsumed his vocal quirkiness to any greater KC ethos. This is also the first album with a co-producer from outside the band. Rhett Davies had recent credits with the second Talking Heads album, Dire Straits’ debut, and multiple Roxy Music and Bryan Ferry albums. It’s possible that he enforced on the band a certain rigid approach, despite what I’m about to say next.

KC to this point hadn’t done an album with a unified mood, and this album is no different. Down tempo pieces such as The Sheltering Sky share sides with rockers like Thela Hun Ginjeet, whilst the meditative Matte Kudesai sits between the bass-driven funk of Elephant Talk and Indiscipline.

It’s possible that the opening track, Elephant Talk, was the first King Crimson song I ever heard. KROQ (Los Angeles’ new wave station which started using the tag line ‘Rock of the 80s’ in about 1978) had it in rotation when it came out even though historically the band weren’t exactly new wave. (Around the same time, they were happy to have Jon and Vangelis’ Friends of Mr. Cairo in rotation as well, even though neither name over the title had new wave cred either.) It’s a strange bit of Belew weirdness in which he rattles off words beginning with the first few letters of the alphabet over a pretty funky bass line.

Frame By Frame might not be the first KC piece with backing vocals, but it’s one of very few, I think. Fripp makes himself known with some of his trademark arpeggios.

Matte Kudesai features a plaintive Belew vocal over a Frippertronics loop. Recently I saw a live video of k.d. lang crooning this, which seemed a really incongruous pairing of singer and song. But in her introduction, she said that it had been an influence on her album Ingenue. Curious, but if you listen to the lang album with this in mind, it’s kind of obvious.

Side 2 opens with Thela Hun Gingeet, a real group effort. Guitars, bass, and drums all play off one another in service of another piece informed by the NY funk scene. The vocal is a tape of Ade talking about meeting some very paranoid folks on the street who think he’s a narc. There are recordings from the time on which he speaks the text found on the tape (like this bootleg from 1981), but in others (including recent Crimson ProjeKct gigs) the original tape (or a digitisation thereof) is used.

The Sheltering Sky, the album’s longest track at over 8 minutes features the interplay of Fripp and Bruford which becomes more complex as the piece evolves. Bruford’s toms are relatively simple and metronomic and might themselves be looped. On the one hand, it harkens to the extended instrumental strangeness of Red and Larks’ Tongues Part II, but it’s really its own beast. Thematically, The Sheltering Sky presages the follow-up’s focus on, well, the Beats, informed by Paul Bowles’ novel of the same name.

Levin and Belew return for the title track which closes the album. Figures from other tracks on the album weave in and out as the musicians take on its complex and ever-changing rhythms.

While Discipline (along with the next two albums) sits uneasily with their previous work, a case can probably be made that the ‘73-’74 albums are also of a piece that doesn’t sit with their other work either.

I give this disc four stars.

Next up: Beat.

(Image credit: Chris DeVito’s tattoo of the knot on the cover of Discipline.)

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Categories 80s, Music, Rock

Bottle Neck Slide – Starless and Bible Black

February 22, 2018 //
2

Island Records/Atlantic Records 1974
This is a really strange offering in the KC canon – much of it was recorded live or derived from live recordings made on the Larks’ Tongues In Aspic tour, and some aspects feel too fast. This is especially true of some of the vocals on side 1. It’s not as though everything is too fast, just that speed sometimes overtakes dynamics.
Richard Palmer-James is back for another go in the writer’s seat. As with LTIA, there’s no overarching theme that ropes the lyrics together. (An argument can be made that the only other Crimson album that has some kind of thematic bonding is 1982’s Beat.) The album is divided equally between four instrumentals and four tracks with words, though side 2 only has two long instrumentals, so the division is not quite equal.
The Great Deceiver starts the album off with a bang, though it’s opening line (‘Health food faggot with a bartered bride’) rubs this listener the wrong way. It’s not common to hear something so derogatory in KC lyrics, though it’s not out of place in a song about the Devil. (ETA: The Elephant Talk FAQ notes that Palmer-James had in mind a meatball, not a derogatory gay reference.) There’s a nice slow bit in the middle of this track that helps it work as not just a rush from point A to point Z. The opening of Lament helps slow the proceedings down a bit. Lyrically it’s odd to hear a first-person, rather mundane song about being in a rock band from Crimson (though one could argue, Easy Money is also about being in a rock band, but from a different perspective). It has some of those nice changes that we’ve come to expect from KC and dives from the languorous opening into something more in keeping with the subject matter.
Next up is a strange little improv called We’ll Let You Know. As he did in Lament as well, Bill Bruford steps a bit into the odd percussive territory that Jamie Muir held on LTIA. It features a really nice interplay with Fripp and Wetton. I’m not sure Cross participates, though he might be on keyboards here. I’m pretty sure it was edited from a longer improv and messed with in the studio – it makes the piece a little less interesting as a base, I’m guessing, to build into a live staple.
The Night Watch (along with side 2’s tour de force Fracture), is one of my favourite songs on the album. The combination of instrumentation, subject matter, and setting is beautifully executed. The verses, telling the story of Rembrandt’s painting of the same name, fit as if joints in a picture frame. It was recorded at the Concertgebouw in Amsterdam, which is about half a mile from the Rijksmuseum where the painting is housed. The painting takes up a large dedicated wall – visitors make their way past hundreds of other pieces to find and then stare at it – if they can get close enough. Unlike the Mona Lisa, which plays a similar role at the Louvre, has one subject, and is about the size of a piece of notebook paper, The Night Watch is about twelve feet by fourteen and features almost two dozen characters and might be the museum’s star attraction.
The song is lyrically straightforward in its telling of the lives of Dutch burgers in the age after the Spanish occupation. There’s a line about the painting being dark (The city fathers frozen there/On the canvas dark with age). It had been displayed over its owners fireplace for several decades and in the 80s or 90s underwent repair and is much brighter now. (I am exceedingly lucky to have very good seats for the Crims’ return to this venue in July and I have hopes that they’ll add this to the set list. When they last played the Netherlands, they came to Utrecht which is very nice, but nearly so close to the subject of one of their songs.)
Trio, another instrumental, famously credits all four band members. Bruford’s credit, if I recall rightly, is ‘Admirable restraint’ as he never identified a place to come in so sat still with drumsticks in hand. Cross’ plaintive violin plays with (or against) Fripp’s Mellotron and guitar weaving in and out, bringing them together and then floating away. Wetton seems to join about three minutes in, gently, before Bruford’s bass drum and cymbals bring us into The Mincer. This one is a menacing vocal track that closes side 1 with effects-laden guitar work that seems to have some of the free jazz influence of earlier albums. The lyrics are oblique at best, but hint at the same feeling as Peter Gabriel’s Intruder who knew ‘something about windows and doors’. With lines like ‘Fingers reaching / linger shrieking…You’re all done baby / breathing, the menace behind the song builds, but the vocal style doesn’t really match.
As noted, side 2 comprises two long instrumentals, the title track and Fracture. In the last week, I’ve listened to this album more than a dozen times and at one point listened to the title track three times in a row. It resists entry. I honestly don’t know know what to make of it. It ebbs and flows between the instruments and sometimes seems to have a purpose and is sometimes just noodling between blasts of interplay before fading back out. The piece lacks a continued sense of itself while easing in and out of a sense of impending menace (yeah, there’s that word again). Eventually it feels like it’s going somewhere, that there’s some kind of synchrony between the musicians. Bruford, about half way through seems to take the reins of the piece and then it slips away again. The whole thing comes to an almost cohesive conclusion in its last minute or so.
And then Fracture comes on. Those opening notes introduce something that works and every section of the piece works together. As a representative of this lineup’s key pieces, it stands with the title track of Red and LTIA‘s bookend pieces as a statement of purpose. At about the eight-minute mark, someone (Wetton, probably, as he usually had a mic in front of him) lets out a ‘Whoo!’ because, I think, they are all in such a groove. It feels composed with room for each member to stretch. This is especially apparent in the version found on the anniversary reissue of the live album USA, recorded on the Starless tour.
There are songs on the album that were composed and arranged as pieces or evolved cogently out of improvisation, and others that are improvs cut to wax. This isn’t a bad thing at all, but in the context of this album, it distinguishes pieces on the album that work for me from others that don’t. As a whole, this album has pieces that absolutely shine and others that don’t succeed nearly as well. I still give it 3 1/2 stars.

Next up: Red.

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Categories Music, Rock

Crimson suspenders – Larks’ Tongues In Aspic

February 10, 2018 //
1

Island Records, 1973

Recorded over a year after Islands and with a completely new lineup, Larks’ Tongues In Aspic takes King Crimson in an entirely new direction. Not only had Robert Fripp dismissed Collins, Burrell, and Ian Wallace, he also parted company with lyricist Pete Sinfield who had provided the words for all four previous Crimson albums.

The new lineup, mad percussionist Jamie Muir, drummer Bill Bruford nicked from an unsatisfying stint in Yes (here he is with Yes in ‘71), violinist David Cross and bassist/vocalist John Wetton (longtime friend of Fripp’s who had declined an invitation to join KC in two years before). Violin? Those strings on Islands and their possibilities possibly sent the band in an interesting new direction with the choice of Cross. And taking over lyrics, poet Richard Palmer-James who would continue to provide words for the next two albums as well. The album consists of three instrumentals, the first part of the title track opens the album followed by three songs with words, Book of Saturdays, Exiles, and Easy Money and closes with Talking Drum and Larks’ Tongues In Aspic Part II. Palmer-James’ lyrics don’t seem to be thematically linked the way Sinfield’s were, especially on the first three albums. One should also note that there’s no embarrassment listening or quoting the words from this album. They’re penetrable or impenetrable as good poetry most of the time.

I got into this album in the 90s when it was recommended by my wife’s violin teacher. KC had a fiddler? Who knew? (At the time, I probably had Red, Court, Discipline, and Beat, but I wasn’t a collector.) Since then, it’s been my go-to perfect King Crimson album. It didn’t hurt that live recordings from the early Adrian Belew period also feature LTIA Part II, which along with Red and occasionally Talking Drum are the only Wetton-era songs that made it into the set lists when he fronted the band. One of the joys of the current line-up is that they’re not only playing LTIA Part II, but also Easy Money and LTIA Part I. (Not to mention several goodies from the first four albums which benefit from Mel Collins’ return to the fold.)

Larks’ Tongues In Aspic Part I announces that a new KC is in town. On the one hand, it’s a multi-part epic of uncompromising, unrelenting noise, but midway through, Cross steps up with no accompaniment at all to deliver an elegy in four strings to which Muir adds bells and some noise and then the song turns again into something else entirely before the opening theme reasserts itself. Fripp and company continue to play with jazz structures, but it’s not jazz that’s found anywhere else. (Yeah, I know, save for in the Crimson Jazz Trio.) There’s something spoken in the back of the song near the end, but for the life of me I can’t make it out.

Following the crashing conclusion of the opening track, Book of Saturdays pulls the mood into almost love song territory. The instrumentation starts with some mellotron which blend really nicely with the violin, and Wetton uses his voice to very good effect. The vocal harmonies at the end of the song are oddly the only musical accents that place this album in its time. The music for the first time in the KC journey is only KC and not folk or prog or jazz. It’s like few other albums in that regard. Wish You Were Here, maybe? Bitches Brew?

Exiles starts with what sound like notes played from underwater and the sound of a distant whale (to my ears). A low drone from Cross introduces the theme. Wetton’s voice is more distinct than those of previous KC vocalists, though I feel an outside producer, especially on this song, would have kept his singing more focused. (Of course an outside producer, in my opinion, would have ruined everything else that makes this such a brilliant album.) There are places that he almost hits the note, but doesn’t quite. It’s a little frustrating. The violin work is essential to the success of the song – one could probably argue that it’s essential to the success of the whole album. David Cross still has it as a centerpiece of his live shows. (The guy on the horns in this video is David Jackson from Van Der Graaf Generator. I was at this gig and absolutely baffled that there were only about 150 people in the audience. Two absolute legends and the Netherlands says ‘meh’.)

Side 2 opens with Easy Money – it’s got the heavy guitar lines we’ve come to expect from the rockier pieces on previous albums, but the song features greater dynamics. This is another track where the violin is key to the whole tune.

After Easy Money, The Talking Drum’s quiet introduction marks it as the odd song out on the album. It only really picks up about two minutes into the action. Along with the other instrumentals on the album, it really marks what become the King Crimson style – the odd time signatures, the intertwining repetitions. The thing is, there’s nowhere else to put it on the album because its conclusion leads right into the opening notes of Larks’ Tongues Part II. It’s one of the great song pairings in rock and roll.

There’s still no describing LTIA Part II – I’ve heard versions by multiple King Crimson lineups and several versions by Stick Men and Crimson ProjeKct as well.Yeah, I know, those other two are just variations on KC, but the song always has a surprise to offer. For me it perfectly rounds out an almost perfect album. 5 stars? Pretty much.

ETA: 23 March 2018 marks the 45th anniversary of the release of this album and there’s a great article on its creation over at dgmlive. Check it out.

Next? Starless and Bible Blackkclthttps://wasawasawa.deviantart.com/art/Lark-s-Tongues-in-Aspic-197213614

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Categories Music, Rock, rock and roll

King Crimson’s Mediterranean Holiday: Islands

February 4, 2018 //
2

Island Records, 1971

Released almost a year after Lizard, Islands is a somewhat mixed bag of very interesting music. As you might have guessed from my previous reviews, I haven’t seen the inside of the Sailor’s Tales box set which gathers up (on 27 discs) almost all the extant studio and live work from the period from In the Wake of Poseidon through Islands. I’m sure has a lot of interesting background material on both those LPs and this one. (I’ve got the follow-up box sets of the ‘72-’74 lineup with their long informative booklets of, so I have some idea of the material included.) So this too is a review of the album as released at the time.

king-crimson-islands-cassetteThe album’s opener, Formentera Lady is introduced by Harry Miller’s double bass theme. Mel Collins’ flute and Keith Tippet’s piano weave around one another behind Boz Burrell’s vocals. (KC’s third vocalist in four albums, Burrell had previously worked with Fripp and other Crimson members in Keith Tippet’s Centipede project.)

This song’s almost stereotypically Asian flute work that introduces the third verse has always led me to confuse Formentera with Formosa (the former English name of Taiwan). Looking it up now, I learn that Formentera is near Ibiza and is part of Spain, and was a popular hippie destination in the late 60s. I obviously didn’t pay that much attention to the lyrics until recently, as its references to Odysseus and Circe in the fourth verse place it in a squarely Mediterranean setting. For a couple of minutes after the last verse, the song moves into a now familiar jazz improvisatory realm, anchored by Burrell’s bass lines, eventually coming back to square one for the final verse. I’m pretty sure the soprano vocals that overlay this section of the song are unique in the KC canon. It’s amusing to note that Joni Mitchell was living on Formentera in 1971 and working on her album Blue, leading one to wonder if she’s who Pete Sinfield is referencing in the title.

The soprano is faded out behind some sax before the mellotron introduces Sailor’s Tale, an almost Philip Glass-like workout for drums, horns, and keyboards. Well, it feels minimalist until some honks from tenor sax take the front of the song. As is becoming familiar in KC territory, the song takes a couple of turns in tempo and instrumentation, increasing in intensity before an oddly long fade. This seems an appropriate way to bring the listeners to the next track.

The Letters, a 16-line story of infidelity and death. closes side 1. The first letter from a husband’s lover to his wife informs her that she’s pregnant, the reply to which seems to indicate the wife has killed her husband (‘What’s mine was yours is dead’) and is about to take her own life (‘I take my leave of mortal flesh’). The opening verses are very quiet but lead to several turns with the sax taking the lead. The middle section of the song is all emotional turmoil until the wife takes up her pen. Collins comes back on flute and in the final lines the instruments leave all the work to Burrell’s bass.

The composition around which the song is arranged dates back to the Giles Giles and Fripp song Why Don’t You Just Drop In, performed on the early Crimson tours as simply Drop In. The lyrics to Drop In, however, are entirely different than those of The Letters.

Side 2 opens with possibly the oddest song for King Crimson to record. A couple of people responded to my assessment of Happy Family on Lizard to tell me it was actually about The Beatles. A case can be made for this, especially when listening to Ladies of the Road, a raunchy paean to groupies which sounds in places like either late model Beatles or early John Lennon solo work. To be honest, I was first turned off to Islands because of this song. It’s direct and explicit and almost glam in its presentation (not a problem for me in the grand scheme – one could hear it fitting in on the soundtracks to Almost Famous or Velvet Goldmine). The main issue I have with this song’s lyrics are not that they’re frank or sexually explicit, but more that the narrator is objectifying (‘[She] Said I’m a male resister / I smiled and just unzipped her’). The worse crime still, however, is that there’s no metaphorical content or lyric irony. This is uncommon both in Sinfield’s other lyric poetry for KC and in Crimson lyrics as a whole.

After the hardness of ‘Ladies’, Prelude: Song of the Gulls is oddly soothing. Its repetitive motif of flute against strings is almost baroque. And despite being a Fripp composition (recorded by Giles Giles and Fripp and also found on The Brondesbury Tapes), the recorded song doesn’t seem to feature him. I’m reminded of the credit given to Bill Bruford for the song Trio on which he doesn’t play (‘admirable restraint’).

Finally, the title track is a slowly built layering of instruments. Flute (or possibly alto sax), piano, and guitar are added to Burrell’s vocals. In the second half of the song, the vocals are faded and Collins switches over to tenor sax and Fripp adds a quiet harmonium as the song gathers in intensity. It’s one of their loveliest songs – up there for me with Matte Kudesai and Walking On Air.

The album works well as a whole, and taken on its own terms is mostly successful. Its production is more polished than that of the earlier albums. Combined with the the photograph on the cover, it’s a departure from how the band had earlier presented itself. I honestly can’t come up with a star rating for it – Islands simply needs to be experienced.

Next on the menu? Larks’ Tongues In Aspic!

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Categories Music, Rock, rock and roll
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