Déjà VROOOM, or How I Got Back My Power To Believe in 2000s-era Krim
The ConstruKction of Light (2000), Heavy ConstruKction (2000) and The Power To Believe (2003)
Our favourite artists are more likely to cause feelings of intense betrayal when they release bad albums. However, because they’re favourites, we are more likely to keep working at some artists’ poorer LPs in the defiant belief that they could not possibly be as bad as all that simply because of who the artists are. There really is no logic to this. However many times I listen to Cerebral Caustic, it’s not going to stop sucking. Yet recently, after repeat listenings, two albums by one of my favourite bands which I had previously thought to be among the greatest disappointments in music history have proved to be not quite as merit-less as I thought.
Between 1969 and 1995, King Crimson released a wealth of great music. Guitarist Robert Fripp led the band through a series of line-ups, with each album building on the innovations of the one before. In the early 70s, the band mutated into the highly improvisational Wetton-Cross-Bruford (bass, violin and drums respectively) line-up which, over 3 LPs and various stunning live performances, produced music of unparalleled intensity, twisted cerebral malevolence and lyrical beauty. After a hiatus, the group returned in the 80s without Wetton and Cross but with Adrian Belew (guitars, vocals) and Tony Levin (bass), two experienced American musicians who helped forge a new, post-New Wave version of King Crimson. Their 3 80s albums represent one of the few sensible attempts of prog to respond to the shifting musical landscape post-1977. Their sound became a warped mix of gamelan, afrobeat, prog and proto-postrock, and King Crimson put many New Wave and post-punk groups to shame, let alone their one-time peers such as Genesis and Yes. Then, after another sabbatical, the group returned in the mid nineties, still with Fripp, Belew, Levin and Bruford but with the addition of Pat Mastelotto (drums) and Trey Gunn (bass). THRAK was released at the height of Britpop, and proved that, in a sea of retro mediocrity, Crimso were still a force to be reckoned with, as sharp, innovative and brutal as ever. Then followed a period of instability, with the band fracturing into various side-projects to search for new directions. In 2000, Crimson reformed, reduced to the quartet of Fripp, Belew, Mastelotto and Gunn, and released The ConstruKction of Light, which was followed in 2003 by The Power To Believe. Both records felt like a massive letdown. Floundering without the support of Bruford and Levin, the band appeared reduced to churning out increasingly uninspired retreads of former glories, heavy with self-reference and bluster but low on melody and innovation. The latter LP earned the less-then-affectionate nickname The ConstruKction of Shite in my household, whilst I heard The Power To Believe once and refused to part with my hard-earned cash for it. King Crimson and the once-invincible Robert Fripp appeared to have lost their way. Cue horrendous disillusion.
Except, about once every year, I would dig out The ConstruKction of Light and listen to it again in the hope that I had missed something the last time round and that, on this hearing, everything would shift into place and the record would reveal itself to be, if not a masterpiece, then at least not a complete embarrassment. This is ridiculous behaviour and a complete waste of time that could be spent listening to a record which doesn’t suck, and I wouldn’t recommend this practice to anybody. Except… except….
Except, finally, after nine years, it finally happened. The ConstruKction of Light remains King Crimson’s worst studio album, but the good news is, actually, it’s not a terrible LP. It’s not even a very bad LP, and in fact has some sublime moments on it. Throughout the album, Trey Gunn, whilst being a perfectly respectable musician, has a hard time moving out of Tony Levin’s shadow, and Pat Mastelotto’s drumming has you longing for Bruford’s return. His drumming lacks the dynamics, subtlety and rhythmic inventiveness that characterises Bruford’s playing, and, whilst the man is certainly a hard act to follow, Pat doesn’t help himself with his over-reliance on bizarre electronic drums and playing in a particularly heavy and stolid style. Having said that, the rhythm section is not entirely to blame for the album’s patchy hit rate. THRAK hinted at chinks in King Crimson’s armour with its occasional tendency to self-referencing: ‘VROOOM’ intentionally recalls ‘Red’ from 1974 in its structure and melody, and there were several ‘knowing’ nods to earlier Crimson LPs in Belew’s lyrics. This process is taken even further here, with large sections of the album being taken up with reworkings of classic Crimso material. ‘FraKctured’ and ‘Larks’ Tongues in Aspic, part IV’ are both unnecessary reworkings of pieces by the classic 70s Crimson, and simply serve to highlight the deficiencies of the new line-up when compared to the legendary Fripp-Wetton-Cross-Bruford line-up. Talking about giving your critics a stick to hit you with. Having said that, ‘FraKctured’, whilst never reaching the dizzying heights of the original, is nice enough, and does contain moments of sublime beauty and bone-crunching menace which make it worth a listen. ‘Larks’ Tongues’, however, fares less well. Split into three further parts for reasons best known to the band, this track is a mess of heavy dissonance which at times suggests that it might break into something less confused but sadly never does. Quite why they felt the need to do ‘Part IV’ is something of a mystery, as the 80s line-up already attempted to revisit ‘Larks Tongues In Aspic’ with the similarly unnecessary and unsuccessful ‘Part III’. However, Adrian Belew’s ‘Coda: I Have A Dream’, which is messily tacked onto the end, is prettily melodic and features some nice playing by both guitarists.
Perhaps as disturbing as Crimson’s reliance on their past is their sudden fondness for novelty songs. The album opens with the truly bizarre ‘ProzaKc Blues’, which is basically King Crimson’s idea of a piss-take of a blues song, replete with Belew pitch-shifted to sound like a gruff blues singer. Featuring joke lyrics, the song is funny but irritating on first listen and just plain irritating on subsequent hearings. ‘The World’s My Oyster Soup Kitchen Floor Wax Museum’ is basically Belew playing a weird word-association game over a knotty, dissonant backing, and sounds like it was more fun to write then it is to listen to, and is chock-full of ‘cute’ references to previous Crimson songs.
However, once King Crimson stop pissing about and actually get down to business, they prove that they do indeed still have the old magic flowing in them. The title track is a thing of wonder, and sounds like nothing in the Crimso catalogue before it. Fripp and Belew’s guitars intertwine like chiming bells, winding through a spiralling stop-start structure that slowly builds into a wonderfully lyrical and melodic song, with Belew’s chiming vocals and some fantastically bizarre lyrics (‘And if Warhol is a genius, then what am I? / A speck of lint on the penis of an alien’). ‘Into the Frying Pan’ sounds like a Beatles song being sung backwards, with some excellent soloing from Fripp. And the bonus track ‘Heaven and Earth’, which is numerous studio jams edited and pasted together, sees the band playing with a subtlety, intensity and lyrical quality missing throughout much of the album proper. All in all, although ConstruKction is a muddled and messy album, it is not without its charm and moments of true transcendence. A listen to Heavy ConstruKction, the triple live album recorded during the tour for ConstruKction, reveals more of this line-up’s strengths and weaknesses. Whilst the band muddle through bizarre cover versions and various old classics which suffer the loss of Bruford and Levin (Mastelotto seems incapable of handling the driving tom-tom beat of ‘Dinosaur’ by himself), much of the new material shines, especially smoother and less cluttered readings of ‘The ContruKction of Light’ and ‘Into the Frying Pan’. The third disc, however, is a real joy. Consisting entirely of improvisations recorded at various stages of the tour, it reveals that this Krim is capable of creating music of visceral intensity and alien beauty with its own individual voice.
Having finally come to terms with ConstruKction, I decided to track down a copy of The Power To Believe and see how it held up in the light of my recent revelation. Although The Power To Believe was generally better received then its predecessor. It didn’t do a thing for me at the time. Listening back to it now, this is squarely the fault of ‘Facts of Life’ and the abysmal ‘Happy With What You Have To Be Happy With’, Crimso’s worst ever track and inexplicably the lead single. Whilst ‘Facts of Life’ is simply poor prog-metal, albeit with some admittedly nice Fripp soloing at various points, ‘Happy…’, this LP’s joke song, this time with Nu Metal as its ‘satirical’ target, is just appalling. To save the band any further embarrassment, I shall say no more about it if they promise never to play the damn thing live ever again. Once you get rid of these tracks, it becomes clear that The Power To Believe is actually a fine album, with the band learning some lessons from ConstruKction’s relative failure. Mastelotto’s drumming is greatly improved, and his drumming is incorporated with electronic drums in a much less grating way. He even plays some almost Bruford-esque fills on ‘EleKtriK’. ‘Level Five’ continues the murky dissonant riffing that marred ‘Larks’ Tongues part IV’, but with more purpose, momentum and melody then before. ‘EleKtriK’ features chiming guitars reminiscent of ‘The ConstruKction of Light’, but in a much smoother and more linear context, building into a ferocious instrumental. ‘Eyes Wide Open’ is a glorious Belew ballad in the tradition of ‘One Time’ or ‘Matte Kudasai’, featuring some lovely guitar playing from both Belew and Fripp, and ‘Dangerous Curves’ is a motorik slow-burner in the style of ‘Talking Drum’, building to a shuddering climax and infused with real menace. The title track, split into four parts, is built around a recurring haiku sung by a voxcodered Belew, and reappears in various contexts, from delicate ambient Frippertronics to chiming gamelan percussion. Overall, The Power To Believe is a much more confident and less troubled recording then The ConstruKction of Light, although, like the previous album, it does suggest that Crimson are now uncomfortably dependent on their past.
I was glad to find that The ConstruKction of Light and The Power To Believe are much better albums then I thought they were, and it’s nice having new King Crimson material to listen to. Although neither album quite sees the band able to shake off the heavy weight of their impressive past and move on as they used to be able to, both are thoroughly respectable efforts, and hint that there may still be life left in the beast. The more out-there material on ContruKction of Light, Heavy ConstruKction and The Power To Believe suggests that, if they really want it, and providing they don’t get complacent, King Crimson still have the potential to strike out and progress to pastures new. And that’s certainly something worth believing in.
Our favourite artists are more likely to cause feelings of intense betrayal when they release bad albums. However, because they’re favourites, we are more likely to keep working at some artists’ poorer LPs in the defiant belief that they could not possibly be as bad as all that simply because of who the artists are. There really is no logic to this. However many times I listen to Cerebral Caustic, it’s not going to stop sucking. Yet recently, after repeat listenings, two albums by one of my favourite bands which I had previously thought to be among the greatest disappointments in music history have proved to be not quite as merit-less as I thought.
Between 1969 and 1995, King Crimson released a wealth of great music. Guitarist Robert Fripp led the band through a series of line-ups, with each album building on the innovations of the one before. In the early 70s, the band mutated into the highly improvisational Wetton-Cross-Bruford (bass, violin and drums respectively) line-up which, over 3 LPs and various stunning live performances, produced music of unparalleled intensity, twisted cerebral malevolence and lyrical beauty. After a hiatus, the group returned in the 80s without Wetton and Cross but with Adrian Belew (guitars, vocals) and Tony Levin (bass), two experienced American musicians who helped forge a new, post-New Wave version of King Crimson. Their 3 80s albums represent one of the few sensible attempts of prog to respond to the shifting musical landscape post-1977. Their sound became a warped mix of gamelan, afrobeat, prog and proto-postrock, and King Crimson put many New Wave and post-punk groups to shame, let alone their one-time peers such as Genesis and Yes. Then, after another sabbatical, the group returned in the mid nineties, still with Fripp, Belew, Levin and Bruford but with the addition of Pat Mastelotto (drums) and Trey Gunn (bass). THRAK was released at the height of Britpop, and proved that, in a sea of retro mediocrity, Crimso were still a force to be reckoned with, as sharp, innovative and brutal as ever. Then followed a period of instability, with the band fracturing into various side-projects to search for new directions. In 2000, Crimson reformed, reduced to the quartet of Fripp, Belew, Mastelotto and Gunn, and released The ConstruKction of Light, which was followed in 2003 by The Power To Believe. Both records felt like a massive letdown. Floundering without the support of Bruford and Levin, the band appeared reduced to churning out increasingly uninspired retreads of former glories, heavy with self-reference and bluster but low on melody and innovation. The latter LP earned the less-then-affectionate nickname The ConstruKction of Shite in my household, whilst I heard The Power To Believe once and refused to part with my hard-earned cash for it. King Crimson and the once-invincible Robert Fripp appeared to have lost their way. Cue horrendous disillusion.
Except, about once every year, I would dig out The ConstruKction of Light and listen to it again in the hope that I had missed something the last time round and that, on this hearing, everything would shift into place and the record would reveal itself to be, if not a masterpiece, then at least not a complete embarrassment. This is ridiculous behaviour and a complete waste of time that could be spent listening to a record which doesn’t suck, and I wouldn’t recommend this practice to anybody. Except… except….
Except, finally, after nine years, it finally happened. The ConstruKction of Light remains King Crimson’s worst studio album, but the good news is, actually, it’s not a terrible LP. It’s not even a very bad LP, and in fact has some sublime moments on it. Throughout the album, Trey Gunn, whilst being a perfectly respectable musician, has a hard time moving out of Tony Levin’s shadow, and Pat Mastelotto’s drumming has you longing for Bruford’s return. His drumming lacks the dynamics, subtlety and rhythmic inventiveness that characterises Bruford’s playing, and, whilst the man is certainly a hard act to follow, Pat doesn’t help himself with his over-reliance on bizarre electronic drums and playing in a particularly heavy and stolid style. Having said that, the rhythm section is not entirely to blame for the album’s patchy hit rate. THRAK hinted at chinks in King Crimson’s armour with its occasional tendency to self-referencing: ‘VROOOM’ intentionally recalls ‘Red’ from 1974 in its structure and melody, and there were several ‘knowing’ nods to earlier Crimson LPs in Belew’s lyrics. This process is taken even further here, with large sections of the album being taken up with reworkings of classic Crimso material. ‘FraKctured’ and ‘Larks’ Tongues in Aspic, part IV’ are both unnecessary reworkings of pieces by the classic 70s Crimson, and simply serve to highlight the deficiencies of the new line-up when compared to the legendary Fripp-Wetton-Cross-Bruford line-up. Talking about giving your critics a stick to hit you with. Having said that, ‘FraKctured’, whilst never reaching the dizzying heights of the original, is nice enough, and does contain moments of sublime beauty and bone-crunching menace which make it worth a listen. ‘Larks’ Tongues’, however, fares less well. Split into three further parts for reasons best known to the band, this track is a mess of heavy dissonance which at times suggests that it might break into something less confused but sadly never does. Quite why they felt the need to do ‘Part IV’ is something of a mystery, as the 80s line-up already attempted to revisit ‘Larks Tongues In Aspic’ with the similarly unnecessary and unsuccessful ‘Part III’. However, Adrian Belew’s ‘Coda: I Have A Dream’, which is messily tacked onto the end, is prettily melodic and features some nice playing by both guitarists.
Perhaps as disturbing as Crimson’s reliance on their past is their sudden fondness for novelty songs. The album opens with the truly bizarre ‘ProzaKc Blues’, which is basically King Crimson’s idea of a piss-take of a blues song, replete with Belew pitch-shifted to sound like a gruff blues singer. Featuring joke lyrics, the song is funny but irritating on first listen and just plain irritating on subsequent hearings. ‘The World’s My Oyster Soup Kitchen Floor Wax Museum’ is basically Belew playing a weird word-association game over a knotty, dissonant backing, and sounds like it was more fun to write then it is to listen to, and is chock-full of ‘cute’ references to previous Crimson songs.
However, once King Crimson stop pissing about and actually get down to business, they prove that they do indeed still have the old magic flowing in them. The title track is a thing of wonder, and sounds like nothing in the Crimso catalogue before it. Fripp and Belew’s guitars intertwine like chiming bells, winding through a spiralling stop-start structure that slowly builds into a wonderfully lyrical and melodic song, with Belew’s chiming vocals and some fantastically bizarre lyrics (‘And if Warhol is a genius, then what am I? / A speck of lint on the penis of an alien’). ‘Into the Frying Pan’ sounds like a Beatles song being sung backwards, with some excellent soloing from Fripp. And the bonus track ‘Heaven and Earth’, which is numerous studio jams edited and pasted together, sees the band playing with a subtlety, intensity and lyrical quality missing throughout much of the album proper. All in all, although ConstruKction is a muddled and messy album, it is not without its charm and moments of true transcendence. A listen to Heavy ConstruKction, the triple live album recorded during the tour for ConstruKction, reveals more of this line-up’s strengths and weaknesses. Whilst the band muddle through bizarre cover versions and various old classics which suffer the loss of Bruford and Levin (Mastelotto seems incapable of handling the driving tom-tom beat of ‘Dinosaur’ by himself), much of the new material shines, especially smoother and less cluttered readings of ‘The ContruKction of Light’ and ‘Into the Frying Pan’. The third disc, however, is a real joy. Consisting entirely of improvisations recorded at various stages of the tour, it reveals that this Krim is capable of creating music of visceral intensity and alien beauty with its own individual voice.
Having finally come to terms with ConstruKction, I decided to track down a copy of The Power To Believe and see how it held up in the light of my recent revelation. Although The Power To Believe was generally better received then its predecessor. It didn’t do a thing for me at the time. Listening back to it now, this is squarely the fault of ‘Facts of Life’ and the abysmal ‘Happy With What You Have To Be Happy With’, Crimso’s worst ever track and inexplicably the lead single. Whilst ‘Facts of Life’ is simply poor prog-metal, albeit with some admittedly nice Fripp soloing at various points, ‘Happy…’, this LP’s joke song, this time with Nu Metal as its ‘satirical’ target, is just appalling. To save the band any further embarrassment, I shall say no more about it if they promise never to play the damn thing live ever again. Once you get rid of these tracks, it becomes clear that The Power To Believe is actually a fine album, with the band learning some lessons from ConstruKction’s relative failure. Mastelotto’s drumming is greatly improved, and his drumming is incorporated with electronic drums in a much less grating way. He even plays some almost Bruford-esque fills on ‘EleKtriK’. ‘Level Five’ continues the murky dissonant riffing that marred ‘Larks’ Tongues part IV’, but with more purpose, momentum and melody then before. ‘EleKtriK’ features chiming guitars reminiscent of ‘The ConstruKction of Light’, but in a much smoother and more linear context, building into a ferocious instrumental. ‘Eyes Wide Open’ is a glorious Belew ballad in the tradition of ‘One Time’ or ‘Matte Kudasai’, featuring some lovely guitar playing from both Belew and Fripp, and ‘Dangerous Curves’ is a motorik slow-burner in the style of ‘Talking Drum’, building to a shuddering climax and infused with real menace. The title track, split into four parts, is built around a recurring haiku sung by a voxcodered Belew, and reappears in various contexts, from delicate ambient Frippertronics to chiming gamelan percussion. Overall, The Power To Believe is a much more confident and less troubled recording then The ConstruKction of Light, although, like the previous album, it does suggest that Crimson are now uncomfortably dependent on their past.
I was glad to find that The ConstruKction of Light and The Power To Believe are much better albums then I thought they were, and it’s nice having new King Crimson material to listen to. Although neither album quite sees the band able to shake off the heavy weight of their impressive past and move on as they used to be able to, both are thoroughly respectable efforts, and hint that there may still be life left in the beast. The more out-there material on ContruKction of Light, Heavy ConstruKction and The Power To Believe suggests that, if they really want it, and providing they don’t get complacent, King Crimson still have the potential to strike out and progress to pastures new. And that’s certainly something worth believing in.
posted by Jonathan Thornton at 10:32 pm
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