Music Roundup 4
In the Court of the Crimson King
Turns out King Crimson haven’t been on Spotify very long, and Robert Fripp is a bit of a legal maniac to the point that the King Crimson Last FM page has the disclaimer
NOTE: Album covers and band images are not available due to certain legal restrictions imposed on last.fm by King Crimson's Management. I guess I’m lucky to have access to this at all, save for trying to find an actualy physical compact disc.
Opening track 21st Century Schizoid Man I know already, though partially from the actual song, and more so from Kanye West sampling it in Power. Not completely sure I’ve broken the association, but at it’s probably a more even balance now.
Prog is always very close to the border of silly (or, like Supertramp last week, barelling over it), and I’m not fully on board with the flute solos that appear here and there. Moonchild seems like it’s going to be a song, but then it’s approx. nine minutes of pissing about. Not the expected prog rock pissing about, just your regular here’s-some-scraps-of-noise pissing about. I still listened to it eight or nine times, but that’s probably the last of it.
And the final track, title track, is real solid stuff. It’s got a forumla that it sticks to, some light guitar and vocals, building up until everything kicks in on ... the court of the crimson king but by god it works. Doesn’t feel like ten minutes.
The Archer
Last week was busy as hell and I don’t think I really gave this a fair shot. It’s very brief (30 minutes) and digestible. It has some very nice hooks and instrumentation choices, even if the subject matter is very simple. Particularly Crying All the Time, in both respects. It seems on the surface to be like “this guy left and now I’m sad”, but actually the first line is My death, it haunts him like a ship/Without a sail, so the whole perspective shifts to thinking that she’s dead and still doing the crying, which is unexpected. The following track, Howl is also really good, using a synth keyboard that sounds a wee bit like an 8-bit video game soundtrack, it’s cool. A couple of tracks later Phantom uses a similar set up, and was, on first pass, the song I liked best, but I think has been surpassed.
Anyway, not loads of time as I said, I’ll keep it in mind for the future.