Starless and Bible Black
Best song: The Mincer? maybe?
Worst song: one of the first three or the title track. I’ll
say The Great Deceiver
Overall grade: 4
After finally, finally living up to their original potential
with the release of ‘Lark’s Tongues’, the mighty Crim were right back in the
studio recording the followup. Unfortunately, they only had about 20 minutes
worth of material. Not the kind of people to let that minor problem deter them
from their goal of releasing wildly inconsistent records every year, they set
to work playing random improvisations until they hit on a few that they thought
would polarise opinions enough to be put on an album.
I don’t like the first couple of minutes of ‘Great Deceiver’
– the melody seems forced and awkward, but it picks up in energy as it moves
on. In the same way, ‘Lament’ takes quite a long time to get going, and the
slow beginning part doesn’t capture my attention at all (this incarnation of
King Crimson is good at LOUD AND INTENSE. On this album they’re often neither of
those things, which works occasionally, eg. Trio, and fails often, eg. here.)
‘We’ll Let You Know’ is a pretty short instrumental and
probably interests me the least out of all of them. It’s played very staccato
all the way through and there’s a lot of beats that are just silence, an effect
that’s used to extremes and causes none of the piece to really flow, so it’s
not a particularly satisfying listen. In fact, it’s not until ‘The Night Watch’
that a track I really like appears; the quietly deranged vocal of that song an
album highlight and its guitar solo noteworthy despite being fairly
conventional.
Another really awesome track is ‘Trio’. It’s an improvised
instrumental which might be about trying to find your way while lost in the
jungle, or that might just be my interpretation, who knows. Funny anecdote
about this song: Bill Bruford has a writing credit on it, which doesn’t seem
strange at all until you realise there is no
percussion. Apparently, his spontaneous decision not to add any was a really integral part of the song – and I
completely agree. It must take a lot of restraint to not start playing when
everyone else is jamming away, but I think he made the right decision, because I
can’t imagine drums improving the track in any way. The mellotron and violin
based piece doesn’t sound like most of this Crimson incarnation, but it’s
nevertheless quite stunning.
‘The Mincer’ is menacing and brilliant. Its dissonance and
general atmosphere mean I never feel quite safe while listening to it; it’s
anything but background music – it’s the kind of thing that if it was played in
a film, you’d be paranoid and on edge and you wouldn’t quite know why. It moves
through a few different genres including a jazzy section and a more rocking one
and includes a searing and unique John Wetton bassline. It ends not with a true
ending, but at the point where the tape ran out during recording, and though
that finish always throws me, I’m very glad they didn’t throw it out and start
again.
Of the two long-form improvisations on the second side, I,
like most people, prefer ‘Fracture’. I hear I’m in good company – Robert Fripp
likes that one too. And why shouldn’t he? His guitar playing is literally on
fire. I mean, it’s a really technical song, and I don’t think it’s meant to
bring a tear to your eye unless you’re trying to play it and failing miserably,
but damn can Fripp play, and I don’t mind him basically ripping off the structure
of ‘Lark’s Tongues, pt.2’ if he keeps using those crazy time signatures and insanely
fast chord switches. There’s absolutely no way he made this up on the spot. At
over eleven minutes it doesn’t leave me breathless throughout, but there are
enough sections that do to make it worthwhile.
The title track is more what you’d expect from an
improvisation, with everybody playing well but nobody coming up with any ideas
that really make you go ‘wow!’ In the words of Steven Wilson when he put out an
album composed entirely of studio jams; “file under self-indulgent”.
I don’t think there’s a single song on this album that I
could ever love unconditionally, but I have a LOT of respect for all these guys
as instrumentalists and songwriters, and sometimes they earn that respect.
Still, I mostly see this as a stopgap to prevent the band from releasing two
classic albums in a row, which obviously just wouldn’t do.
No comments:
Post a Comment