Sunday 23 June 2013

King Crimson: In the Court of the Crimson King

In the Court of the Crimson King

Best song: The Court of the Crimson King

Worst song: Moonchild

Overall grade: 7

Greg Lake’s voice blows me away. Even on 21st Century Schizoid Man, where it’s so distorted you can barely make out what he’s saying, it’s just… wow. King Crimson were mighty inconsistent but they had a handful of outstanding albums with little to elevate one above another, so I’m not ashamed to say that it’s Greg Lake’s presence that pushes this one to the top of the pile for me. I reckon he just edges out Peter Gabriel for my favourite vocalist ever, and his best work can be found right here.
I could just write 500 words on the power and intensity and the hundreds of different emotions of Lake’s voice, but I want people to actually read this, so I won’t. Instead, I’ll talk about the other things that make it awesome! The album, that is, not his voice. There are just five songs, four of them are close to flawless, and put together they would make something that’s incredibly worthy of the title ‘first ever progressive rock album’, whether it’s completely true or not.
We kick things off with ‘21st Century Schizoid Man’, which is still different to anything else I’ve ever heard, so I can only imagine what it was like in 1969. Then there’s ‘I Talk To The Wind’. King Crimson are generally thought of as being one of the heavier, more avant-garde of prog bands, but this song proves that they could do the other side of things just as well. It’s so light and floaty, led by Ian McDonald’s flute and light on the drums.
Closing off Side One is ‘Epitaph’, and listening to this makes it easy to see why the genre immediately got its reputation of being bombastic and pretentious – two traits which many people see as automatically negative, as when they’re done well (like here!) they can work. Although Lake’s voice is so far down in the mix here that I’m often straining to hear it and miss other details of the song.
‘Moonchild’ is the only one here that I don’t consider one of the four classics. The first two and a half minutes are another ‘I Talk To The Wind’-style ballad, only nowhere near as awesome, but it’s the following ten minutes that I’m going to complain about. That being said, though, I don’t have the strong reaction to it that most people do. I’ve heard it called unlistenable, but it doesn’t repulse me, more, it disappoints me. Up to this point every note of every song has felt like it was planned out and agonised over so that it would be exactly right, but here, it’s so aimless. It’s not even a proper instrumental jam – it’s more like everyone said ‘I think I’m just going to play three random notes, trail off and wait for someone else to do the same kind of thing…’ Why? Why, when you have a group of such obviously talented songwriters, would you waste ten minutes on that?
But it’s OK! We finish off with ‘The Court of the Crimson King’ and this, maybe this was the whole point. Robert Fripp and co. made us sit through all of ‘Moonchild’ just so that this epic would seem even better by comparison! Let me tell you, that moment around the 8 minute mark just after ‘The Dance of the Puppets’ when the whole band comes crashing back in – that makes it worth it, every single time. The whole song is stunning, powerful, and keeps me on the edge of my seat for the whole 9 minutes. Prog would get better than this, but not much.

(Fun game: listen to any other prog band and try to guess which of these five songs they were most inspired by.)

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