Tusk (1979)

Artist: Fleetwood Mac
Release Year: 1979

Rating: 8/10

Track Listing: 1) Over and Over; 2) The Ledge; 3) Think About Me; 4) Save Me a Place; 5) Sara; 6) What Makes You Think You're the One; 7) Storms; 8) That's All for Everyone; 9) Not That Funny; 10) Sisters of the Moon; 11) Angel; 12) That's Enough for Me; 13) Brown Eyes; 14) Never Make Me Cry; 15) I Know I'm Not Wrong; 16) Honey Hi; 17) Beautiful Child; 18) Walk a Thin Line; 19) Tusk; 20) Never Forget.

Well, here I go again with my usual rants against double albums.  You know, I should probably just make a separate page for this part.  All the usual double album problems abound, but some really, really great ideas emerge on here.

The best numbers are the rockers.  "The Ledge" and "Not That Funny" are loud, stompy, and fun, with just enough paranoia in there: pure Lindsey, in other words.  And "Think About Me" is just as good as everything on Rumours, from the immaculately smooth melodic turns to the perfect synergy between all the members.  In a way, this may be as good a contender for the "quintessential Fleetwood Mac song" as you can get.  "Sisters of the Moon" is even better, though.  Anybody who loves "The Chain" but wants more of Stevie Nicks' trademark "witchy" intonations in there will be happy - and that's before Buckingham caps it off with some of the most ferocious solos he's ever played.  

The mid-tempo numbers are mostly brilliant, too.  "Save Me a Place" is the big highlight here for its impeccable harmonies that verge on religious, but "Angel" gives us some of the most infectious hooks on the album.  Then, there are the other, dreamier numbers that instill a falling, cascading feeling that's really something else.  "That's All for Everyone" and "Walk a Thin Line" are the ones that manage this, and both are great.  And as for "Sara", it's certainly beautiful, and it takes you places, but I have to be in the right mindset for a six-minute meditation that remains in the same chord sequence and buries most of its instrumental dynamism so low in the mix.  Fortunately, that mindset isn't hard for me to reach after the first four songs.  Good stuff.

Unfortunately, there's less good to be said about the slower numbers.  Of course, no Mac album is complete without a few romantic meditations, but you have to be careful how many of those you plant onto a double album.  And no matter what you do, do not open with a sleeper like "Over and Over"!  It's pleasant, but either crank up the tempo or move it down a few tracks.  Later on, "Storms" and "Beautiful Child" are heartfelt and pretty, but also sleep-inducing, sucking all the energy out of the proceedings.  The former, in particular, stops us dead after the exasperated romp of "What Makes You Think You're the One", and the momentum is never fully recovered afterward.  

The biggest miracle, though, is the white-hot brilliance of the title track.  "Tusk" may be a phallic metaphor, sure, but it's also a direct thematic complement to the prehistoric, primal urges in the song, further suggested by those thup-thupping drums and background ululations.  And they got a whole marching band to join them for this!  By the time the shouts of "TUSK!" begin, with those eerie trumpet blasts behind them, it really sounds like a prehistoric blood ritual of some kind, and it's fantastic.  Is it worth slogging through about five filler songs before something as infectious as this?  Who knows, but now that we're here, I'm happy.

Even if this were a single album, though, and a lot of the filler tracks had been left off, I'd still have a major problem with the sound quality  on this album.  Maybe it's something to do with the production, but there's a certain "thinness" to the sound that prevents most of these songs from really coming to life.  The immediacy of the previous two albums is gone, and in its place is a hazy sort of distance that brings nothing but lethargy by the second half.  And yet, for all that that implies, there are still a lot of great ideas on here, many of which must rank among the band's best.  It's just that the production turns songs that could have stood out on their own, into cloudy fragments that are harder to separate from the whole, while also depriving them of the chance to break apart from the two monolithic albums before them.

In the end, what you get is something halfway between Blonde on Blonde and All Things Must Pass, both in length and in vibes.  Listening to this all in one go is certainly doable, but somewhere along the line, it becomes as much of a meditation as it does an album.  That's all fine enough if you're a Dylan- or Harrison-level songwriter, but some of these songs are just nowhere near that, and that breaks the spell more often than not.  

All right, that's enough of that, now, because this is still one of Fleetwood Mac's best albums, and a constant favorite of mine despite its length.  There's almost the same kind of mysticism present here that also made Rumours work so well, with the added experimentation and rawness of sound to bring out a different kind of magic.   

Three of a Perfect Pair (1984)

Artist: King Crimson
Release Year: 1984

Rating: 7/10

Track Listing: 1) Three of a Perfect Pair; 2) Model Man; 3) Sleepless; 4) Man with an Open Heart; 5) Nuages (That Which Passes, Passes Like Clouds); 6) Industry; 7) Dig Me; 8) No Warning; 9) Larks' Tongues in Aspic (Part III).

I'm sure that by now, Tony Levin fans are foaming at the mouth because I haven't fully acknowledged his wondrous contributions to 80s King Crimson.  Well fret not, LTE-stans, because his moment is here and now.  Tony's deepest grooves are on here, and I'm not just talking about "Sleepless".  His bass pulses and thrums and growls all over these tracks, adding a character that's hard to put a finger on.

But as long as we're on the subject, "Sleepless" is phenomenal.  Right from the start, Tony rips in with the coolest slap bass riff ever, sounding both portentous and groovy, and there's no way tons of people wouldn't get up and dance to this even today.  And hearing those chromatic verses about insomniac hallucinations, constantly shifting into falsetto, before collapsing back into the "don't fight it, it's over your heeeaaaaad" chorus, is a constant delight.

But wait...catchy choruses?  Dancing?  Sure sounds out of place for a King Crimson album!

Yes, the poppiest King Crimson songs are found on Side A of this album.  The title track is catchy as hell and could have almost found a home on the radio, yet the intricate guitar riffs and spooky, Freudian lyrics keep us comfortably separate from the usual pop-slop land of the Eighties.  "Model Man" and "Man with an Open Heart" each could have been hits in a different life, with the effortlessly smooth and human chorus of the former, and the "weird, bouncy "oh-oh-oh-ohhhohh" in the chorus of the latter, sounding like something from...I dunno, The Human League?  I remember Belew once issuing an apology for "Open Heart" on his old Elephant Blog circa 2009 or so, which everyone in the comments agreed was unnecessary.  Poor guy, feeling shame over something as infectious as this.

On side B, we have less excitement, but of course we can't demand a full pop album like a bunch of plebs.  "Nuages" is nicely atmospheric with its airy drone and feather-light pulse, but it doesn't need to be as long as it is.  Same goes for "Industry",  which depicts the subject well enough, I guess...but said depiction is more of a static portrait than a dynamic journey, and that makes it one of the low points for me-- especially after we just had a five-minute drone beforehand.  Look to Absent Lovers for a much-improved live rendition.  Neither of theses are bad, but going a solid ten minutes with hardly any melody is a hard thing to swallow for even arrogant prog fans like me.  

They must have realized this melodically-lacking problem, because next we have "Dig Me", a weird song about an old sports car.  Cool idea and all, having the clunky, distorted verses to suggest a junkyard smasher, and contrasting that with a weirdly angelic chorus, but it's not really a highlight in context.  Then it's right back to the drone, as "No Warning" continues the dark, ambient side of things for another four minutes, although here we at least get some of Bill Bruford's suffocating drum solos.  

But!  If there was any doubt that the old King Crimson is still present here, "Larks' Tongues in Aspic" makes another appearance, and in the same New Wave skin as everything else.  The riffs are still aggressive, the rhythm still dynamic, but the sound is sharper and more precise, with Fripp's parts in the second half sounding like a calibrated laser cutter slicing through us.  It's a great piece that goes some way toward salvaging the lost momentum.  And hey: Tony Levin is here is full force again, throwing in some ferocious passages that sound like bubbling magma.  What a great ending to the album.

Fripp and Belew were at odds during the recording of Beat, and I can't help but see this division as a sort of "you stay on your side, I'll stay on mine" resolution to that.  But the result, to me, is an unfortunate and lopsided whole that loses a lot of steam in the middle.  Fripp keeps mainly to the realm of interlocking with Belew on the pop songs, and bzzz-zzz-bzzz-ing along with his Frippertronics sounds on everything else.  A supremely talented gentleman and scholar as always, but I just wish we could've gotten more crunch out of him.

So, in summation, this is a weirdly polarized album that offers a lot of infectious and interesting moments, but the awkward bits also present the lowest points of Eighties' Crimson.  

Monster Movie (1969)

Artist: Can
Release Year: 1969

Rating: 6/10

Track Listing: 1) Father Cannot Yell; 2) Mary, Mary So Contrary; 3) Outside My Door; 4) You Doo Right.

Before their "classic" period with Damo Suzuki, Can had Malcolm Mooney on the mic, and the character he lent to the band was one of raving devotion, both to the music and to whatever subject he decided to vocalize about.  All these songs may have more or less the signature Eastern-drone-meets-African-groove elements injected into the rock formula, but Mooney's pleading, raspy-voiced presence turned the whole product into something of a primitive religious devotional.  Yes, although it was Suzuki who claimed to sing in the "language of the Stone Age", Mooney managed to capture the desperation of the frightened, starving, sexually frustrated primate brain almost as well, albeit with a more hazy and dreamy surrender to the "ritual" atmosphere provided by his bandmates.

"Father Cannot Yell" starts out restless and paranoid, with Mooney babbling out that eerie monologue that almost becomes a verse-- but good luck paying full attention in the midst of that droning, screeching guitar freakout that clearly took cues from The Velvet Underground's early records.  By the time the guitars die down and the rhythm section moves to the fore, the vocals have devolved into a wordless mantra, as if it were more important to keep up his place in the jam than to deliver any actual meaning.  I can't usually say that a singer going "ah-uhuh-uh-ahh" for several minutes keeps my attention, but there you go.  Just keep the guitar solos a little more condensed and this is a bigger win for the band.  "Outside My Door " is cool too, I guess, though they clearly ripped the guitar riff from "Lucifer Sam".  This is where you'll find the closest thing to a conventional melody on the album, even though it's still cut up with yelping interjections from Mooney before the guitars come in to bury him in the groove again.

Ironically, the most tripped-out and dangerous-sounding song on here is the one with the nursery rhyme lyrics.  Despite its softer sound, "Mary, Mary So Contrary" has all the drone of the previous song, but this time with a woozy, swaying melody drenched in feedback and accentuated with stinging guitars.  It's excellent, and I'd almost rank this dark, portentous song alongside the likes of "Paperhouse".

Really the whole point of the twenty-minute "You Doo Right" is that it's but a snippet of the original six hours of continuous jamming from which it resulted.  I don't know how far along in the session this track was clipped from, but it was clearly long enough for Malcolm Mooney's voice to devolve into halfhearted yips and exhausted subvocalizations.  Still, I can't be too upset at the guy's commitment as he wails on and on like a primitive man in a trance, as if he's doing a desperate ritual dance for the harvest.  So, fully enrapturing it is not, but there's certainly an appreciation on my end, and the fact that he had to leave the band soon afterward due to his mental health is, shall we say, another contextual amplifier.

Overall, this is an unstable, sometimes frustrating cauldron of paranoid grooves that came well ahead of its time.  The cool effects and general flexibility of later records had not yet set in, so the sound is limited and a bit monotonous with little to break the sludgy feel throughout.  There's nothing keeping me from enjoying the best moments, but why put this one on regularly when you have Tago Mago?

Beat (1982)

Artist: King Crimson
Release Year: 1982

Rating: 8/10

Track Listing: 1) Neal and Jack and Me; 2) Heartbeat; 3) Sartori in Tangier; 4) Waiting Man; 5) Neurotica; 6) Two Hands; 7) The Howler; 8) Requiem.

Similar to Discipline, but a bit more humorous and personable.  Adrian Belew does the band a lot of favors here, and I have to hand it to Fripp for choosing him as the perfect face of the 80s Crimson.  Whether he's growling and shouting the paranoid narration of urban scenes in "Neal and Jack and Me" or weaving a lover's soft, intimate laments in "Two Hands", Belew is the undisputed central figure of this album.

So, if I like Belew so much, why do I not rate this album as highly as Discipline?  It's hard to put a finger on that, but I think there might be almost too much Belew on here, to the point that the Crimson of old seems to fade away in form as well as in essence.  But, then again...how can that be true?  Look how complex everything still is!  Who ever said prog couldn't be fun?  Who said it couldn't be impulsive and human?

Speaking of humanism, the album's title alone is an indicator of where we are now: an homage to the Beat generation of Kerouac and friends, and a pseudo-diegetic recognition of the band's evolution to suit the times.  I could write for ages about how this album seems to warp the very real aspects of urban life and modern experience through the surreal and almost postmodern lens of blurring faces, animal chimeras, living paintings, and so forth, but that would tell us nothing about how the record sounds, so I'll leave it for another day.

For the most accessible King Crimson song ever cut, look to "Heartbeat".  Hell, you could hear that performed by the likes of Duran Duran or somebody, but then you wouldn't get the laser precision of Belew's springy chords in the chorus and the liquid slides from Fripp afterward.  

In fact, that song leads us to a good characterization of the album as a whole.  The guitar tones are satin-smooth, the bass and Chapman stick liquid and syrupy, the drums precise.  The songs are shorter, catchier, and more to the point.  It's very much a New Wave album, done in the prog manner, and it's a weird sort of balance that is enabled by the frantic humor of songs like "Neurotica".  No one but Belew could deliver the motor-mouthed descriptions of a "hammerhead hand in hand with a mandrill" and not make it feel out of place.  How fitting is it, then, that Adrian would later remember the Beat sessions as the worst of his life?  I can only assume he felt the exhausting demand of being a pretender to the Crimson throne.

Not that Fripp isn't always present regardless, of course-- check out his bewildering, futuristic shredding on the instrumental "Sartori in Tangier", for instance-- but his wizardry is not the driving force behind these songs.  That honor instead goes to Belew, or even to Tony Levin and Bill Bruford, as more rhythm-heavy grooves dominate the record, leaving the guitar work to be drizzled over it for flavor.  In fact, when Fripp unequivocally takes the helm again on the closing "Requiem", blaring over the jazzy drum shuffles and moaning bass lines with horrified, spasming, head-clutching, face-melting solos of madness and despair, it's a jarring contrast against the more open, conversational atmosphere of everything that came before, and almost doesn't seem to fit.  That's a hard thing for some of us to accept from King Crimson, I think, especially after one of David Byrne's followers has already brought a more candid personality to the band.  I say it's a welcome change, though, and an open mind brings great results.

Red (1974)

Artist: King Crimson 
Release Year: 1974

Rating: 9/10

Track Listing: 1) Red; 2) Fallen Angel; 3) One More Red Nightmare; 4) Providence; 5) Starless.

And then there were three.  Wait-- wrong band.

But yes, David Cross is out now, and it's just Fripp, Wetton, and Broof to complete what would turn out to be the swan song of 70s Crim.  The result is the most erudite madness, or the spookiest intellectualism, of this incarnation.  

Some of this music had existed before the album was cut, but had been in constant evolution as live material.  Fortunately, the band managed to wrap everything into a tight final form before heading into the studio.  The one exception is "Providence", another live jam that was probably included to fill space, but fortunately, this paranoid jam fits right in with the rest of the album.  Cross was still around to lend his eerie, creaking violin, which sounds like an evil spirit creeping up on its prey.  By the time the others really let loose, it's like the walls closing in, and it's mostly worth the wait.

I don't know if I love the title track as much as I'm supposed to, but it is certainly great.  It's a primal, angry, guitar riff-centered piece that suggests images of bloodshed and war: deep-seated fixtures of the human psyche, and red indeed.

"Fallen Angel" is a gorgeous-- and surprisingly human-- ballad about a street urchin's brother dying in a knife fight.  Imagine that as a King Crimson storyline!  Even the moments that would come off as melodramatic in the hands of a lesser band (e.g., the "life expiring in the snow" bit) are wound into the composition with care and control.  And forgive me, but between the fugue-like melody and the oboe accompaniment, I can even hear some of this as an influence on Seal's "Kiss from a Rose" twenty years later.  Am I off the mark?

"One More Red Nightmare" is phenomenal too.  The lyrics tell an exciting enough story, and the heavy, jazz-funk instrumental is an almost cinematic journey through mad, panicked hallucinations that seem to build eternally.  There's also this wonderfully crazed wah-wah effect that somebody is using...I assume it's Fripp, but who knows.   And hey, we even get Ian McDonald and Mel Collins in the studio again as guest stars!  The early days come full circle.

And I don't know if "Starless" is the greatest King Crimson song ever, but I can't be happier with the way the 70s KC chose to end their career.  This and "21st Century Schizoid Man" are the two songs that every student of rock music must hear: the first for the historical significance, but this one for a sort of "King Crimson in microcosm" experience.  It's a masterpiece in three movements: first, a weeping, poetic ballad featuring some of John Wetton's finest vocal work; second, a minimalistic, two-note guitar motif over bass and percussion that turn steadily more impatient as the tension rises; and third, an eruption into jazz-fusion hysterics, as if the inner demons the band has been nursing this whole album have finally burst free.  And then, when the final reprise begins, it's a thing of sublime satisfaction-- nay, perfection.  This is the only adequate finale to the old King Crimson: epic, ominous, cerebral, sprawling, cathartic, and staggering in its ambition and execution.  There was no better way to close the book.

Ultimately, there's not too much difference between the sound of the previous album and this one, but there's more unity and deliberate intention here.  The cohesive feeling of bitter darkness and danger is what makes this album work so well.  After this, Robert Fripp would wander off into an isolated spiritual phase before returning to the world through a solo career, and I have to wonder whether he'd seen the same writing on the wall for bloated, expensive progressive suites then as we see in hindsight today.  Regardless, the call of the terrible Crim would not let him rest for long, and the Eighties would see a mutation to suit the changing times.

Starless and Bible Black (1974)

Artist: King Crimson 

Release Year: 1974

Rating: 7/10

Track Listing: 1) The Great Deceiver; 2) Lament; 3) We'll Let You Know; 4) The Night Watch; 5) Trio; 6) The Mincer; 7) Starless and Bible Black; 8) Fracture.

Here's where they showed us how the sausage is made.  I use that metaphor because, in this and other incarnations of Crimson, a lot of great songs evolved out of live jams.  This album is part studio, part live, which means that half of these tracks are still in the larval stage.  I still consider the parts mostly great individually, but the thing as a whole doesn't flow well, which is a real shame.

The practice of splicing studio and live tracks together into a single album was not a new one: Family had recently done the same thing on Anyway in 1970, with mostly good results, and the Stones had even thrown in some live tracks on their own records before that.  But so many stretches of this album are quiet, apprehensive moments of live improvisations when the members were testing the waters before building up steam: an essential part of a jam session, sure, but not something to be included on a holistic product like this.  Every time they start a jam, one must crank up the volume to hear anything, and the album's momentum is lost while the band figures out where to go.  Most of these jams do get interesting eventually, though.  Whether it's the funky, bluesy swagger of "We'll Let You Know", which showcases some of Wetton's most rollicking bass work, or the lovely tranquility of "Trio", on which Bill Bruford is credited with "admirable restraint" for not playing, there are always moments of that enigmatic "white magic" to which Fripp once referred...even if we have to slog through moments of sleepy noodling in the first half of the title track, or some atonal messes like "The Mincer", to get there.

On the plus side, "Lament" starts out as a quiet and morose ballad before slamming into the most bitter and cynical rocking number the band had ever done.  Can't you almost see John Wetton swapped out for Roger Waters for that one?  My favorite, though, is "The Night Watch", named after the unofficial moniker of the Rembrandt painting [here].  This is the most emotional KC song for me, a haunting and heartfelt tribute to the first flickers of modern self-determination depicted in that Renaissance masterpiece.  Fripp's solo is full of lamentation and longing, while remaining literate and dignified, and I can never get enough of it.
  

And of course, no review of this album is complete without mentioning "Fracture".  This is where that classic King Crimson trope, of tension built and then released, is best enshrined.  The piece feels precarious from the beginning, but soon moves into outright danger.  But why did they have to keep the famous "moto perpetuo" section so quiet compared to the rest of the song?  This is the piece that Fripp himself called the hardest thing he ever played!  It's the purest essence of his style as a guitarist, as complex as an orb weaver's web and twice as beautiful.  But make no mistake: the tension has gone nowhere, and when we finally explode into the climactic section, the fury is unbelievable.  Even Broof himself can't resist throwing out an exhilarated "wooo!" as he and Wetton thunder along like a planet-killing meteor shower.

Finally, a certain outdated lyrical term aside, I cannot give enough praise to "The Great Deceiver".  To start with a song as ass-kicking as this, with that dizzy, zig-zagging riff drilling into your ears, and the rhythm bashing over your head, is an instant elevation of the album's potential-- not to mention the chorus that contains the only lyrics Robert Fripp ever wrote for the band.  This is where we hear the best aspect of this album: the mix of heavy blues, hard jazz, metal, and funk, all done with classical sensibilities, as if the worldliness and literacy of Larks' Tongues in Aspic were to tack on a bit of street smarts and grit.  It's just a shame they had to lean so far into the live jams that break the flow in such a big way.  Pare those down, blend the tracks together better, and it's a nine.

Larks' Tongues in Aspic (1973)

Artist: King Crimson
Release Year: 1973

Rating: 10/10

Track Listing: 1) Larks' Tongues in Aspic, Part One; 2) Book of Saturday; 3) Exiles; 4) Easy Money; 5) The Talking Drum; 6) Larks' Tongues in Aspic, Part Two.

Once again, Robert Fripp found himself reassembling the shambles of King Crimson, this time with some heavyweight prog alumni.  Enter John Wetton from Family on bass and vocals, and Bill Bruford from Yes on drums, along with violinist David Cross and the eccentric Jamie Muir on "percussion and allsorts", as it were.  But this is not just a change in personnel-- it's a great alteration in musical direction.  The medieval and fantastical airs of old have vanished, along with Peter Sinfield; now, with the more grounded lyrics of Richard Palmer-James, the band zeroes in on a more eclectic mix of hard rock, jazz, and blues, along with various Asian and African influences and whatever madness Jamie Muir insists on injecting on a given day.  The playing is even tighter, the jams more focused, the riffs heavier.  

The result?  A masterpiece.  These new faces, it seems, were exactly the breath of fresh air that Crimson needed, and I suspect a lot of it had to do with the stripped-down vision and the staggering versatility of the performers.  No longer did Fripp require an entire mini-orchestra to flesh out a song, and so many things in life are easier with fewer cooks in the kitchen.

The first "Larks'" piece is less a song and more a tapestry in multiple movements, almost like a wing of a museum all on its own.  It's baffling how they start out with the mere plinking of a thumb piano and bells, only to crash into the heaviest riffage and bewildering jazz-metal guitar passages Fripp can throw at us.  Jamie Muir is all over this one, throwing in so many little effects for just enough texture and whimsy to keep us afloat.  Don't discount Wetton, either: this is the guy who drove the "flying brick wall" that Fripp himself admitted to struggling to keep up with in concert, and it's in full force from the start.  After this, a quiet, solemn passage from Cross's violin is all that remains, as if the heaviness that came before is dangling over a void on a wispy golden thread.  But then, at about 10:10, when that thread suddenly composes itself in stately declaration, we plunge back into that bubbling cauldron, with the threatening guitar and silk-smooth violin playing us out in equal measure.  And this is only track one.  Not music for driving, but I don't need any distractions when I'm indulging like this.

And all those ballads on the previous albums are lain flat by "Book of Saturday", a drowsy, beautiful, romantic offering that gives us the first taste of Wetton's rich baritone vocals.  This is also the first time we hear the softer, sweeter, more personal tone that Fripp adopted for moments like this, and it's fantastic.  After this, "Exiles" is an atmospheric and breezy depiction of what you'd suspect is Napoleon on Elba, but no one's sure.  All I know is that I can indeed smell and feel the salty breeze, and experience the protagonist's bittersweet longing, and that's enough for me.  

But, to ensure we're not bogged down in sentiment, "Easy Money" stomps in with its demented, drooling blues-rock swagger.  This song is so much fun all throughout, from the cocky, lascivious verses to the deliberate guitar jam in the middle that meanders here and there while moving upward all the time, like it's building a sort of rhetorical case, to even the little scrapes and rattles and laughs thrown in by Jamie Muir.  By the time we mosey on back to the main theme, Fripp and Broof are competing for the prize of "coolest fill", and they both win.  I'm just glad they didn't use that other second verse on this album-- if you know, you know.

The vocals are done now, but the journey continues with the best example of that quintessential King Crimson motif of tension-and-release.  "The Talking Drum" builds so much anticipation with that oscillating bassline and that meandering violin solo that never resolves, instead continuing to buzz around our heads like an insistent tsetse fly.  When the guitar finally kicks in, the tension is almost teeth-grittingly painful, like a psychic abscess about to burst-- and when it does, we crash into the headbanging second part of "Larks' Tongues".  It's as close to an instant classic as you get in the prog world, so aggressively triumphant in its serrated guitar attacks and slamming riffs and thrumming bass pulses, yet still leaving room for David Cross to throw in a searing violin solo that caps everything off like a gold leaf on a fine cut of steak.  And if your friends ever complain that no one can dance in 5/4, then show them the video of Robert Fripp's wife Toyah proving them wrong.

I hope I've heaped enough praise on this album by now, and I hope I've done so with all the appropriate metaphors.  This is like stumbling upon a beautiful, ornate atlas of an uncharted continent, and finding that that atlas is also a gripping novel AND a delicious meal.  It's the ultimate refinement of all I ever wanted from literate rock music, and it's been my favorite King Crimson release since I first heard it twenty years ago.

Islands (1971)

Artist: King Crimson
Release Year: 1971

Rating: 7/10

Track Listing: 1) Formentera Lady; 2) Sailor's Tale; 3) The Letters; 4) Ladies of the Road; 5) Prelude: Song of the Gulls; 6) Islands.

It's always a strange moment when I remember that a full three of these six tracks include at least some rocking element; yet, the album as a whole has a heavy, sleepy quality that drags it down.  But, because this is King Crimson, the result of that dragging-down is still a very solid album.  

That sleepy sort of atmosphere is where "Formentera Lady" kicks things off, and although King Crimson have historically built those subtle, muttering vocal lines and tinkling piano cascades into something more substantial, here they opted to bring in some rather dissonant vocal chants from a certain Paulina Lucas, and doing that for another five minutes just doesn't work.  Interesting, though, that this is the only time you'll ever hear a woman on a King Crimson album.  At least Mel Collins ensures there's still a pulse the whole time.  

Fortunately, we soon awaken into the furious "Sailor's Tale".  This is a blazing instrumental that starts out portentous and tense before swiftly boiling over into frantic solos: first, the terrible rabid wail of Collins' saxophone, like the panicked screech of a wounded beast; then, a metallic, clanking guitar solo from Fripp, suggesting the rattling of a ship's lines in a violent storm; and finally, the Mellotron swells to engulf everything in the end, like the sinking of the Pequod.  Fantastic in theory, but...still, I can't help feeling like the sound and fury of this piece is still secondary to the desolate tapestry on which it appears.

"The Letters" is actually an incarnation of the old Giles, Giles, & Fripp song "Drop In", but with the old lyrics replaced with some tragic messages between a wife and a mistress.  That jump from the soft, wintery verse to the roaring instrumental is almost too jarring, but I guess in the context of the story it works.  But if it seems strange that Crim would do a love drama like this, just wait for "Ladies of the Road" and its nasty and licentious verses about "unzipping" feminists and fetishizing Chinese girls and everything else.  Ironically, for all the dumb, hypermasculine posturing of this song, I can't help but compare it to the Beatles.  The switch between 4/4 in the verses and 3/4 in the chorus is a mirror image of "Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds", right down to the airy harmonies in the chorus that must have been a joke; meanwhile, the bass-driven shuffle of the verses harkens back to "Come Together".  At any rate, I still marvel both at Pete Sinfield writing these lyrics and at Fripp signing off on the song, but maybe he needed to humor Boz Burrell or something-- after all, the guy did go on to Bad Company almost immediately after this.

But if King Crimson could veer so far into pop rock melody and lecherous boasts, so could they run the other way into pure classical.  "Song of the Gulls" is not rock music in the slightest, but a string- and woodwind-laden lullaby.  It's a piece of real beauty for sure, but I'm still glad that this track only goes for a few minutes before we reach the title track.  For my money, this is not only the most underrated song of early King Crimson, but among their all-time best tracks.   The lyrics here are second to none, and Boz Burrell's thin, perishing vocal style is actually a perfect fit for those lines like "wreath snatch-hand briars, where owls know my eyes".  When we finally reach the ethereal chorus with its minimalistic, pitter-pattering keys, it's like we've really drifted away into a lonely, but heart-rendingly beautiful void.  "Infinite peace", indeed-- but is that a lonely peace, or a liberated one?  I say it's both, and it's brilliant.  When the brass solos kick in at the end, we're elevated into the sky and out into the cosmos, sailing right past the nebulae depicted on the cover art.  It's the feeling of a weary sort of personal triumph that no one else will ever know.

Overall, another impressive album for a band that was again on the brink of collapse.  It's just that the lifelessness pervades, to the point that the more energetic parts come off as exceptions and special allowances, always pulling back toward the slumbering norm.

Lizard (1970)

Artist: King Crimson
Release Year: 1970

Rating: 7/10

Track Listing: 1) Cirkus; 2) Indoor Games; 3) Happy Family; 4) Lady of the Dancing Water; 5) Lizard.

Somehow, despite the entire band collapsing during the Poseidon sessions, Robert Fripp managed to not only resurrect King Crimson from the ashes, but also get a second album out in the same year, a feat which undoubtedly sliced a few years off his lifespan.  By all accounts, the experience was a miserable one even by Crimson standards, and I find that easy to believe while listening to this.  Not that it's bad-- I did give it a seven, after all-- but the tension certainly bleeds into the music in ways that may not have been intentional, and it often feels like the jazzy ornamentation only masks some kind of ill beneath.  Fortunately, said ornamentation is still King Crimson, so off we go again.

"Cirkus" is a fun opener, like a brighter cousin to "Court of the Crimson King".  All the zany characters seem to welcome us into this mysterious big-top world, and even those intimidating Mellotron riffs can't divert us from the surreal journey through this circus.  Again, Robert Fripp's acoustic guitar licks are a delight.  When the sax solo kicks in, though, we realize the scene is tinged with a bit of sadness, which makes it less shocking when the whole show collapses into disorder, both lyrically and musically, like the tent itself is crashing down.  Sure, you probably wouldn't listen to this on a road trip, but that's not the band's problem.

What follows is a pair of witty but disjointed jazz-rock numbers containing the craziest King Crimson lyrics this side of a wax museum.  They're sorta fun, but not the best this band has offered.  Why did they use that annoying vocal effect on "Indoor Games"?  What's with that handful of dead notes during the flute solo in "Happy Family"?  Not great, not horrible.  And, as a beautiful medieval ballad much like "Cadence and Cascade", "Lady of the Dancing Water" makes for a nice bridge onto Side Two.

The "Lizard" suite is split into four sections of varying intrigue.  "Prince Rupert Awakes" is the first and best, with Jon Andersen (!) providing guest vocals for this hazy, dreamlike overture of a young noble's righteous screeds against invaders.  Those Mellotron sweeps, like veils pulled aside from a sacred sarcophagus, suggest some semi-divine character to Prince Rupert...could he be related to the Crimson King?  Even as some kind of Byronic foil?  This gives way to "The Peacock's Tale", a smooth, warm classical piece over military drum rolls, slowly growing into a jazzy romp: nice, but overlong.  

"The Battle of Glass Tears" starts with a wonderfully tense and foreboding description of coming bloodshed, courtesy of Gordon Haskell's mournful vocals.  But after that, if you're looking to hear the ranks of armored men and lizards approaching each other, before the arrows start flying, the trumpets blare, and masses of men collide in horrific slaughter...then you will.  But if you're not, then what you'll likely experience is just an alternation of tense, quiet moments and more brass cacophony.  The end gives us a panorama of the bloody field, with Fripp's guitar sustains screeching a pained realization at the futility of so much death and destruction-- before "Big Top" suddenly wraps things up with a strange circus theme.  I guess they were making a statement about the cyclical nature of...something.  I'm too lazy to figure it out.  A cool suite overall, but it bogs down under its own weight a lot of the time.  

In fact, that last sentence is a good summation of this album overall.  A lot of the of the melodies are lumbering and bulbous, but the elementary problem isn't the melodies themselves.  It's the ornate, dizzying, and bloated sound that arises from the huge mix of instruments on here, all seemingly going in different directions like a musical Jackson Pollock: clearly a deliberate composition, but still off-putting in its disorder to any casual observer.  This is a gatekeeper's album if there ever was one, and as a guy who doesn't often enjoy pure jazz, I had to let this one grow on me for years.

In the Wake of Poseidon (1970)

Artist: King Crimson
Release Year: 1970

Rating: 8/10

Track Listing: 1) Peace: A Beginning; 2) Pictures of a City; 3) Cadence and Cascade; 4) In the Wake of Poseidon; 5) Peace: A Theme; 6) Cat Food; 7) The Devil's Triangle; 8) Peace: An End.

King Crimson was, for much of its history, a band in turmoil and schism, a state that plagued even its transition to this second album.  Mortal men can only serve as conduits of genius for so long, you know, so Greg Lake departed halfway through to form ELP.  The remaining vocal duties were picked up by one Gordon Haskell, a solid but far less charismatic choice.  Fortunately, Lake was still around for most of this; without him, I fear it would have been an egregiously tired retread of In the Court.

So what is it instead?  Well, a mostly great retread of In the Court, albeit with a less grim atmosphere in places.  Case in point: the album is bookended and bisected by little "Peace" ditties, which are pretty but non-essential.  This is one album where the hippie-dippy, kumbaya-vibe comes through a bit more than I'd like-- I mean, what do you expect me to do after this thing is over?  Save the world with a humanistic Care Bare Stare?  You just drilled into my head with a piece called "The Devil's Triangle".  The early 70s were a weird time.  The moment, if it even existed at all, was gone, and now "that was just a dream some of us had", as Joni Mitchell would later put it.  At least the acoustic guitar parts are comforting.

"Pictures of a City" is certainly a lot like "21st Century Schizoid Man" in structure, if not in lyrics: a screaming guitar-and-sax intro, two verses, a nice long instrumental, a third verse, and a chaotic finale.  But where "Schizoid" piledrives us with images and sounds of destruction, this song instead tells an impressionistic story of urban debauchery.  The middle section is jazzier, almost similar to something Deep Purple and Blind Faith might have done together, and I'm happy to announce that the drums sound much fuller this time around.  Much as I love Bill Bruford, I'm glad we got a chance to hear Michael Giles' laser-precise madness for one more album.

Then there's "Cadence and Cascade", a drop-dead gorgeous and surprisingly emotional song complemented by Ian McDonald's whimsical flute solos, much like "I Talk to the Wind", but even slightly better.  This is the first time we hear Gordon Haskell singing, although there are some coveted recordings out there of Greg Lake doing the vocals too.  And I love Fripp's acoustic playing.  Why he had to go full electric after the first few albums (Judas!) is still a mystery to me.

Mirroring "Epitaph" and "Court of the Crimson King", there is the title track, a full-on medieval dirge with Mellotron and military march-style drumming to amplify some of my favorite Crimson lyrics.  Grand, almost Biblical symbolism abounds, again courtesy of Peter Sinfield, but the thing only teeters on the brink of pretentiousness without actually falling over.  I'm sure glad Greg Lake was still around to do these vocals.

I never knew what to think about "Cat Food".  Anyone who's heard Sinfield's solo work would be unsurprised by his screeds against processed meals-- not that he's wrong, but this kind of theme is a bit odd for King Crimson.  At least the lyrics are amusing, and there's plenty of personality with Keith Tippett's piano skittering all over the place like the titular pet.  The song's more madcap vibe doesn't exactly fit the album, but I'm not upset at it.

Finally, the band did their own take on Gustav Holst's "Mars: Bringer of War", apparently changing it just enough to slap their own title on it.  This thing is certainly imposing and frightening (especially that part around 4 minutes in-- you'll know the one), but I can't help feeling like something is lost when a Mellotron does most of the heavy lifting.  Still, the way the suite builds tension, in what would become the classic Crimson style, keeps the spirit of the album very well in spite of the muddy sound, so I'll let it slide.  

Overall, this album is full of exciting and beautiful pieces that could have been tied together with sturdier string than those "Peace" segments.  It's not as earth-shattering in theme, or as satisfying in cohesion, as the previous; but with so many great moments in the midst of the band's ongoing disintegration, it's still a worthy follow-up.

In the Court of the Crimson King (1969)

Artist: King Crimson
Release Year: 1969

Rating: 10/10

Track Listing: 1) 21st Century Schizoid Man; 2) I Talk to the Wind; 3) Epitaph; 4) Moonchild; 5) Court of the Crimson King.

Well, here we are, folks.  I'm going to try to maintain my usual aim of reviewing the music without digressing into the greater social and artistic contexts in which it emerged-- both because I don't know enough to do that intelligently, and because we'd be here all day.  Instead, I'm going to try to illustrate this album's personal significance through a story, which is going to be long and probably not relevant, but I have to tell it somewhere.  Feel free to skip ahead to the non-italicized portion below.  

As a young child, I once looked through some of my parents' records, still rather hazy on the idea of greatest hits collections versus albums proper.  I believe it was right as I flipped over that Air Supply sleeve that I was immediately jumpscared by the screaming face you see above.  Far too young to contend with this, I flipped it back over and fled.

A bit later, I had a bunch of those Beginner Books that were similar to Dr. Seuss, but a bit more grounded in realism.  The ones I remember most were The Big Jump and The King's Wish and Other Stories, both by Benjamin Elkin.  Click [here] to see the aesthetic if you want.  Anyway, these were my gateway to a world of vintage fantasy that involved good kings, well-spoken dragons, dastardly knaves, and all sorts of artifacts and spells.  Something about the art style, and probably the musty smell of those old pages, imprinted on my instinctual understanding of medieval and fantasy aesthetics, long before I'd even heard of D&D or Lord of the Rings.

Then, years later, I went rummaging through that same stack of vinyl, and I found the album again.  Now, at fourteen, I was intrigued.  Having suffered both the personal intrusions of puberty, and the social disillusion of the corruption, terrorism, and war of the 2000s, I was enticed by the horrified album art that now felt more in-touch and worldly.  Plus the sleeve looked and smelled a lot like those old fantasy books I'd loved as a kid, so what could an already-nostalgic young person do?  Having previously listened to the likes of Styx and Kansas, and even some Renaissance and Camel, I was primed for a proper prog rock experience.  However, still being in the habit of skipping around an album, I started with "I Talk to the Wind".

Yes, the very first King Crimson song I ever heard was "I Talk to the Wind".  I loved it.  It was unlike anything I'd ever heard before, like a soft, whimsical sonic manifestation of those old fantasy books I'd loved as a child.  Certainly, I thought, the rest of the album must sound like this!  I mean, look at the gatefold art with all the magical spheres and whatnot!  

But when I reset the needle to the starting groove, and that angry, searing riff exploded over my speakers, like a sinister fanfare of Armageddon, I was so confused as to nearly be put off the album entirely.  How could mellow, dreamy fantasy about wandering late-men coexist with such harsh, serrated metallic roars like that?  That immortal riff is like the foot of some terrible beast stomping on Tokyo, forcing us all to contend with what's behind the curtain of our blind suburban optimism.  Greg Lake's distorted voice screams out imagery like a photojournalist's reel: "Paranoia's poison door", "blind man's greed", "innocents raped with napalm fire"...the reality of the Man of the 21st Century– and if it was so predictable in 1969, then we shouldn't be surprised now.  But it's not long before even words fail to depict the horror, and we launch into an acidic, proto-jazz-metal nightmare of screeching sax, wailing guitar, and a terrifyingly precise flexibility from the bass and drums beneath: so many moving parts, yet so perfectly woven into a swirling narrative depiction of madness without words.  Fripp's solo in particular is like a slow, meticulous evisceration by a demented surgeon.  When we finally crash back into the main theme, it's almost a relief-- that is, until a cacophony of free improvisation chews us up and spits us into a silent void.

After the apocalyptic end of "Schizoid Man", we're catapulted back to the middle ages for the rest of the album, a fact that few seem to acknowledge-- yes, only seven and a half of these 44 minutes are especially heavy!  In fact, this is one of King Crimson's softest albums, at least in terms of the music.  What's heavy is the thematic content: isolation from society, the dominance of ignorance and destruction, the terror of despots, the spectre of extinction.  Hard not to feel like the whole album is as heavy as those crunching riffs at the beginning, with lyrics like that to keep up the psychological momentum.  

That's why "Epitaph" is so crushing: because even in the midst of this vintage-high-fantasy storybook, all the plaintive Mellotron washes and gorgeously emotive vocalizations from Greg Lake bring the eternal realities of human existence into a relief so great that we would likely vomit in hopelessness, if not for the mercy of diegesis to separate us a bit.  There's actually little change in terms of melodic motifs across these eight minutes-- the whole track just plods along like the painful, despairing funeral march that it is, and the song is all the better for it.  We can pretend that these lyrics of "instruments of death" and so on are but the pronouncements of the mad "late-man" from the previous track...but of course, there's really no fourth wall to protect us here.  "The fate of all Mankind, I see, is in the hands of fools."  I needn't comment further.

"Moonchild" is an enigmatic relief, with its two dreamy verses about a possibly-supernatural girl in a lovely medieval style, before its watery Mellotron drone leads us into a long, ethereal, and yes, sometimes disjointed improvisation.  Do I feel like these nine minutes of bare-bones, often sedated noodles and twiddles and bleeps are earned?  Well, not entirely, but I can't deny the band's ability to pull me into that dark and mysterious dream all the same.  Somewhere in all those dissonant plinks and bloops is a narrative thread through a shadowed fairy forest of things my mortal brain can only half comprehend, and it only feels right to trust the process as we're carried along, with some shred of hope that we'll come out the other end.

And when we do awaken and emerge back into civilization, it's with an awestruck overture of cinematic grandeur.  The way that epic chorus of "ahh-ahh-ah-ahhh" suggests an entry into a gigantic, magnificent hall of opulence, ruled by a king of terrifying power, is cause for never-ending adoration from me.  The acoustic guitar and Greg Lake's gentle, knowing narrative style paint a perfect picture of this surreal court of jesters, jugglers, fire witches, prism ships, and a monarch who seems superhuman, perhaps even a sort of demigod.  Clearly, we are meant to be awestruck, but are we also supposed to be afraid?  Is this king malevolent, or does he simply exist outside the realm of puny human morality?  Wait-- who are we talking about here?  The character or the band?  Did lyricist Peter Sinfield write this as a jab at Fripp?  Who knows-- that guy layered so much into his lyrics that you'd need a whole canon bible to sort it all out.  Hope someone is archiving SongSoupOnSea.

My one complaint about this album is the production, which sounds oddly dry and thin for an album as epic as this.  A lot of the time, it sounds like Michael Giles is doing his precise, jazz-wizard drumming on a sheet of cardboard, and some of the intricate brass and guitar work is "flattened", if you will.  Apparently, that was intentional, though, because even recent remasters do not change this.  Maybe I'm just a philistine.

The ever-shifting lineup of Fripp's terrifying outfit would ensure this is is a place that not even Crim would touch again.  A statement it must have been, this vision that starts with us being bombed into oblivion, only to spend another 36 minutes in a high-fantasy world that swiftly becomes but a reflection of our own twisted, maniacal world, albeit in different costumes.  Is that a statement about the ubiquity of human oppression and suffering, regardless of era?  Is that why the screaming face on the cover is devoid of any temporal identifier-- so that he may represent all of Man throughout the ages?  

Or maybe they just wanted to scare little kids, like they did to me, years before I dared to listen.  Rites of passage are a strange thing.

Horse Rotorvator (1986)

Artist: Coil
Release Year: 1986

Rating: 7/10

Track Listing: 1) The Anal Staircase; 2) Slur; 3) Babylero; 4) Ostia; 5) Herald; 6) Penetralia; 7) Ravenous; 8) Circles of Mania; 9) Blood from the Air; 10) Who by Fire; 11) The Golden Section; 12) The First Five Minutes After Death.

I must be eternally poisoned by the internet age, because "Babylero" just reminds me of the Hamster Dance.

That aside, what I like about this album is its willingness to take the usual darling aspects of the human experience, like sex and childbirth and togetherness, and reveal them as horrific and grotesque.  Yeah, I did just slam the first album for seeming to try too hard at this, but here it works much better, and a lot of that has to do with the melodies.  No, there aren't many moments for a normie to dance to, but there's more dynamism in the motifs-- enough to allow a listener to hear music instead of just music-shaped cacophony.  Usually.

Sure, there are the usual edgelord cudgels like "The Anal Staircase", but at least that one has a groove.  Better, check out the demented shuffle of "Slur"-- or, better yet-- the lush, poisoned-honey seduction of "Ostia", with those MIDI sounds mimicking the harpsichord in some kind of Gothic overture.  "You can hear the bones humming", indeed!  "Who by Fire" is listenable and has a nice, lurching feel to it to complement the great lyrics, even if the melody is a bit Mother Goose-sounding.  But whoever decided to throw in those Arab-esque chants deserves a raise.  Even the more challenging pieces, like "Penetralia", have their moments, helped along by the pulverizing guitar riffs and drums.  This is how to do "death music" well.  

Still, Horse Rotorvator is not my favorite thing in the world.  I don't mind the drones of "Blood from the Air", but did they really have to include all those dissonant sound segments throughout?  What good are those?  Still better than the narration in "The Golden Section", though.  This isn't "The Gift"-- just let that dreadful, ominous march roll on uninterrupted.

The one place where the wheels really come off is on "Circles of Mania".  This could have been a great swing jazz satire, if not for the incessant vocal screeching that goes far overboard.  This is one of those moments where Coil seem to veer back into performance art-- fine if that's the intent, but I don't enjoy it.  I'd rather hear Tom Waits do this kind of thing, even if he wouldn't dare touch the "fucking the ground" segment.  Win some, lose some.

Leviathan (2004)

Artist: Mastodon
Release Year: 2004

Rating: 9/10

Track Listing: 1) Blood and Thunder; 2) I Am Ahab; 3) Seabeast; 4) Island; 5) Iron Tusk; 6) Megalodon; 7) Naked Burn; 8) Aqua Dementia; 9) Hearts Alive; 10) Joseph Merrick.

We've all heard mathematical metal, sure--but how many of us know any literary metal?  And I don't just mean because this album is based on Moby-Dick.  I mean because the tracks move through different motifs that illustrate characters and motivations, even as the pulverizing style of sludge metal threatens to pound us blindly into the ground the whole time.  And the thing is, you'd think you have to look up the lyrics, but the track titles alone tell us what we need to know.

The first two tracks are instant classics, with their growling, lurching, roaring cries for murder and cosmic vengeance setting the stage perfectly.  Indeed, there are times when things threaten to go entirely off the rails into insanity.  Look at the odes to the old ways in "Island"-- or, better yet, the absolutely rabid yelping in "Aqua Dementia" that comes the closest to capturing the kind of fury a man like Ahab must feel at the cosmos.  

Conversely, there are some lighter moments, but never a breath of fully clean air.  "Seabeast" is the perfect depiction of the whale himself: an uneasy, lurching verse melody that's repeated over and over like a madman's mantra, nowhere near as urgent as the previous two tracks, but still warning of latent destruction if we get too close.  And apparently, "Naked Burn" wasn't even written as part of the story, but its emotional lamentation of "save yourself, don't wait on me" accidentally winds up a near-perfect fit for Ahab's canonical surrender to his own madness.

The one controversy I'm likely to ignite is this: I don't love "Hearts Alive" any more than the rest of these tracks.  I like it, sure, but it's not as epic-sounding as its 13.5 minute runtime would imply-- just your standard, high-quality Mastodon song with great riffs and a killer groove, but stretched out to double length-- that is, until the incredible solo kicks in at the end.  Then, when we finally close out with the acoustic-driven instrumental "Joseph Merrick" (the legal name of the Elephant Man), it's less like we've closed the book and more like we're dripping wet and shivering in the dark.

What a great album.  Of course the riffs and guitar solos are excellent, but I have to specifically praise Brann Dailor's paranoid, walls-closing-in style of drumming.  This is the album where he really became a focal point for me.  I have a harder time picking out green tracks on this album, both because everything on it is good, and because there's so much coherence that the individual songs become orphaned when removed from the context.  This is a novel, after all, and it must be experienced as a whole. 

A Hard Day's Night (1964)

Artist: The Beatles
Release Year: 1964

Rating: 8/10

Track Listing: 1) A Hard Day's Night; 2) I Should Have Known Better; 3) If I Fell; 4) I'm Happy Just to Dance with You; 5) And I Love Her; 6) Tell Me Why; 7) Can't Buy Me Love; 8) Anytime at All; 9) I'll Cry Instead; 10) Things We Said Today; 11) When I Get Home; 12) You Can't Do That; 13) I'll Be Back.

I suppose I’d call this the first really famous Beatles album, in that the name instantly calls to mind both a hit song and a film.  But let’s not forget the artistic vision, which has also taken another leap.  There’s not a cover to be found here, leaving the Lennon/McCartney juggernaut to entertain us for a full 30 minutes.  So, do they succeed?  Well, I guess you could just look at the number of green tracks up there, but since you’re already reading this, I’ll blather on.  

First of all, if you haven’t seen the film, it’s a harmless bit of wacky, even surreal fun, essentially serving as one long music video to squeeze more cash out of the band and their fans.  The songs are mostly light and sunny, even “silly love songs” at times, as Sir Paul would later call them…but what’s wrong with that?

Well, a few minor things.  “Tell Me Why” is a bit generic in melody and lyrics, and is in fact the song I often use as a counterargument to the claim that the Beatles never wrote filler– yet, I can’t help but conclude that that falsetto “if there’s anything that I could ever doo-oo-ooo” in the bridge singlehandedly saves the song from ruin.

See,  even if the songs themselves aren’t nearly so insipid, there’s still a lot of the teeny-bop mentality floating around here, so it’s refreshing when the album dips into moodier territory.  “And I Love Her” and “I’ll Be Back” are two great examples of that contrast, like dark chocolate on an album of cotton candy, but my favorite of these is the portentous, almost baroque atmosphere of “Things We Said Today”.  I mean, why does Paul make it sound so ominous?   What did they say today?  It isn’t clear, and it’s that ambiguity that makes the song work so well.  Between that and the unexpected turns of “If I Fell”, there’s plenty for the more somber listener to appreciate.

Ha!  How serious can one be, though, when the album also contains “Can’t Buy Me Love”, or “I Should Have Known Better”, or the immortal title track?  Listen to how loud and obsessive, even borderline rabid, they sound on songs like those and try to imagine not grinning like an idiot with great taste.  This is young love par excellence, after all: love of one's partner, love of possibility, love of life, you name it.

Still, nothing in this life can be perfect, so the album is hobbled a bit by a few awkward throwaways like “I’ll Cry Instead” or “When I Get Home”, with the latter grating on me the most.  But those don't impact my enjoyment of the album all that much.  Yeah, there were a few more steps to be taken toward “maturity”, as it were– but in the spirit of this album I say life is better without that.

Remission (2002)

Artist: Mastodon
Release Year: 2002

Rating: 8/10

Track Listing: 1) Crusher Destroyer; 2) March of the Fire Ants; 3) Where Strides the Behemoth; 4) Workhorse; 5) Ol'e Nessie; 6) Burning Man; 7) Trainwreck; 8) Trampled Under Hoof; 9) Trilobite; 10) Mother Puncher; 11) Elephant Man.

Here it is, the CD that was my official gateway into everything heavier than Metallica.  Right from the opening T. rex roar, we're thrown into a current of murderous rage, and I'd have it no other way.  

Listen to that guitar solo in "Crusher Destroyer" and tell me there's no animalistic madness behind it.  Yes, there's the appropriately primal fury throughout this album, as if we're awakened something even more ancient and lethal than the band's namesake.  Just listen to that electrifying riff that opens up "Mother Puncher" for a perfect example.  Not every band can manage this sort of aesthetic without being tongue-in-cheek, or without it coming off as laughably phony, but Mastodon do so handily.

Naturally, there are brutal, pulverizing sludge-metal torrents in "Where Strides the Behemoth", "Burning Man", and "Trampled Under Hoof", and while there's little variety between those, I say that if it ain't broke, don't fix it.  "Behemoth" is my favorite, though it's hard to decide whether that's because of the bludgeoning rage of each vocal line, or the scrabbling, drilling riff, or the suffocating drum breakdown, or just because it was the first Mastodon song I ever heard.  

And it's clear that Mastodon had prog inclinations right out of the gate-- just listen to the relentless time changes in "March of the Fire Ants", which you may not even notice if you're too busy being beaten over the head with filthy, growling riffs and images of terrestrial decay.  "Workhorse" does sort of the same thing, but this is where you hear the closest representation of the flayed, screaming horse on the album cover.  

There are quieter moments too, and while none of them annoy me, some stretches feel like they were inserted as contrast against the heavier bulk, rather than to serve a distinct purpose on their own.  It's fine when "Ol'e Nessie" gives us a meandering breather before launching into the heavier half, but when  "Trainwreck" and "Trilobite" do the same thing over, the trick loses its impact when the dizzying, paranoid chaos returns again.  Maybe this is the one area where the album loses just a bit of praise, because the couplets of tracks 5-6, 7-8, and 9-10 all feel pretty similar in that regard.

Then the album closes with a desolate, brooding instrumental in "Elephant Man", which contains an extended guitar solo that seems equal parts angry, painful, and just exhausted by existence.  Again, the prog comes in, but only as a side effect of what's already being presented-- just like the way the heaviness seems to arise.

That's right: very little of this sounds like it was deliberately written to be edgy or heavy or anything like that-- it just is.  While I have no trouble envisioning people moshing or headbanging to this, it seems like the heaviness was an incidental characteristic of the music rather than a predetermined template for it, and that's important.  This album proves that Mastodon had the impeccable sense of groove down right from the beginning.  That's what first drew me in, and that's what keeps me around even today.

Journey to the Centre of the Eye (1971)

Artist: Nektar
Release Year: 1971

Rating: 5/10

Track Listing: 1) Prelude; 2) Astronaut's Nightmare; 3) Countenance; 4) The Nine Lifeless Daughters of the Sun; 5) Warp Oversight; 6) The Dream Nebula I; 7) The Dream Nebula II; 8) It's All in the Mind; 9) Burn Out My Eyes; 10) Void of Vision; 11) Pupil of the Eye; 12) Look Inside Yourself; 13) Death of the Mind.

Wait…this is supposed to be the story of an astronaut having some great Awakening near Saturn, right?  Is that album art a reference to 2001: A Space Odyssey?  Wouldn't surprise me.

Anyway, here's Nektar in the wake of a wider psychedelic movement, which means they were practically forced to lean extra hard into their natural trippy tendencies.  The "Prelude" and "Astronaut's Nightmare" manage to sound adequately epic despite being slightly generic, at least in terms of resembling what others bands like The Pretty Things were doing around the same time.  But while said Pretty Things often sounded strained while doing hard rock, from these guys it sounds more natural, so that's good.  There's also a bit of mannerism in those verses that inject some sadness, some lamentation, making us feel a greater weight in what's to come.  

Unfortunately, what's to come is largely a mess, especially today.  "Countenance" is a good primer for so many other Nektar releases: an eerie, dusky, slow buildup to a sudden heavy psychedelic guitar freakout, with some good old "aahh-ahh-ahh" in the background too.  Nice, but then this is overextended into "Nine Lifeless Daughters", which goes nowhere for several minutes before devolving into the needless cacophony that is "Warp Oversight".  Obviously, this was meant as an imitation of "Interstellar Overdrive", but I assume that without a healthy dose of LSD or something, I'm just not going to get it.

I just wish they wouldn't wander around so much before they get to the good stuff.  What's with the wholesome, 50s throwback vocals AND the Mellotron together in "It's All in the Mind"?  And why is it mixed so badly?  Is this a lost track from Epitaph or something?  But those flute solos do have something going for them.  After that one, though, the album slumps into some interesting, but disjointed and half-baked segments done over an annoying organ riff...yuck.

With a bit more focus, this album could have been great, but it just bogs down in psychedelic tangents too often at the expense of melody.  Moments of bittersweet, revelatory beauty are present ("Burn Out My Eyes" in particular), but the strangely tinny production really doesn't help here-- all those organs and cymbals really grate on the ears.  Interesting, with some solid playing throughout, but very little of this can back up the "profound spiritual awakening" that it implicitly claims to provide.

The Left Banke Too (1968)

Artist: The Left Banke
Release Year: 1968

Rating: 7/10

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Track Listing: 1) Goodbye Holly; 2) There's Gonna Be a Storm; 3) Sing Little Bird Sing; 4) Nice to See You; 5) Give the Man a Hand; 6) Bryant Hotel; 7) Desiree; 8) Dark Is the Bark; 9) In the Morning Light; 10) My Friend Today.

Hideous album cover, but that's far from the only hit that these guys took after Michael Brown's departure.  So much of this album reminisces about the stellar marriage of pop lightness and baroque darkness that begat the immaculate debut, but it rarely manages to return there again.  Sadly, while these songs are still pleasant and warm and very very listenable, they still come off as rejects from the debut.  Still, to expect these guys to reproduce Walk Away Renee/Pretty Ballerina would have been a tall order even with Michael Brown, let alone without him…so what did they come up with?

Well, I do love the opener "Goodbye Holly", one of the catchiest tracks they ever cut.  I mean, who could resist the swanky guitar riffs or the eager, gorgeous harmonies-- or the voice of Holly herself in the bridge?  Sounds like something the Zombies would've done around then.  On the other hand, "There's Gonna Be a Storm" is pretty and nice moody, but please tell me: whose dumb idea was it to put this song second?  It sounds like it should be last!  Putting a song like this here just kills the momentum we gained in the first track.  Bleh.

Then there's the usual vague-but-still preachy, "spiritual" tripe of the day, like in "Give the Man a Hand".  I can't deny that the chorus is catchy, but it also sounds like it's patronizing me for not seeing some obvious conclusion it's putting in front of me.

Back to the good.  "Desiree" is a gorgeous ballad that stands up to everything on the debut, from the mysterious "everything returns again…" exposition to the winding prechorus, which builds up to the revelatory, almost hymn-like chorus.  Oh, wait-- Michael Brown was involved with that one.  Go figure!  And "Bryant Hotel" is a ton of fun, with those haunting vocals describing the most decrepit hovel, before the chorus crashes in with a flurry of plinking piano and some screaming that only goes a little overboard.

Otherwise, it's mostly nice, mildly-above-average Sixties pop with some orchestration.  "Nice to See You" and "Dark Is the Bark" are pleasantly harmonized as usual for the Left Banke-- the first light and airy, the second dusky and romantic-- yet there's not much to make either of them much different from what the Beach Boys could have done a few years earlier.  

The rest of the album is similar in that regard: pleasant and likeable, but lacking in the punch, the immediacy, that made the debut such an incredible achievement.  Even the standout tracks can't break the feeling of stagnation that pervades the album as a whole, which is too bad, because the sound is still a unique one that I hate to see the virtual end of.

Seatrain (1970)

Artist: Seatrain
Release Year: 1970

Rating: 7/10

Track Listing: 1) Willin'; 2) Song of Job; 3) Broken Morning; 4) Home to You; 5) Out Where the Hills; 6) Waiting for Elijah; 7) 13 Questions; 8) Oh My Love; 9) Sally Goodin; 10) Creepin' Midnight; 11) Orange Blossom Special.

One look at that album cover would instill confusion in anyone who knows me well.  A country album?!  What that photo reveals, though, is a group of humble guys who are well aware of the way they might be received by snobs like me, and hence play their music with just a bit of humor to rejuvenate the old country and blues cliches.  There's very little of that dead-serious, oceanic reverence that plagues so much country music--just a good-natured fun time with lots of heart, and I can't dislike an album with those qualities.

It's clear that Peter Rowan and Co. had a very real passion for their bluegrass and gospel roots: just listen to those yodels and choral chants in "Home to You", for example.  Hell, that one and "Creepin' Midnight" almost remind me of something Carole King and Bob Dylan could have done together.  Wait...Carole King did write "Creepin' Midnight"?  Ha!  What do I win?!

But, speaking of gospel, there's a retelling of the Book of Job, which is an affront to my usual rule against religious retellings, but those vocal workouts and the little wah-wah accents every time Satan shows up make for an entertaining blues number all the same.  Still not as great as their cover of Little Feat's classic trucker anthem "Willin'", though: for all the quiet dignity of the original, this faster and brighter rendition injects enough new enthusiasm to turn it into a singalong highlight.  Also early on, "Broken Morning" is warm and soulful with a great chorus.

But!  The best has to be their blistering adaptation of "Orange Blossom Special".  I've not heard such infectious fiddlin' this side of "Beef: it's what's for dinner", and when the vocals kick in, that declaration of "bringin' my baby baaaack!" is suitably triumphant and never fails to lift my spirits.  And yet, Richard Greene has the generosity to continue his face-melting solo for another minute or two afterward.  Fantastic.

Now, there are a number of generic country-blues numbers in the middle, like "Out Where the Hills" or "Oh My Love", and that's where this album slumps a little for me.  Oh, and the "Sally Goodin'" track tacked on the end of the latter is probably the most obnoxiously backwoods of them all, but at least it's short.  None of these fully disrupts the vibe, though, and I suppose a better fan of southern rock and country might like them better.

With just a bit more artsy-fartsy touches like their fellow Californians in Frisco were doing at the time, this album might have been catapulted even higher.  Still, considering the only copy of this album that I ever owned was a decrepit vinyl pressing, I'm glad to have dug up a nice remaster.

Scatology (1984)

Artist: Coil
Release Year: 1984

Rating: 6/10

Track Listing: 1) Ubu Noir; 2) Panic; 3) At the Heart of It All; 4) Tenderness of Wolves; 5) The Spoiler; 6) Clap; 7) Solar Lodge; 8) The Sewage Worker's Birthday Party; 9) Godhead-Deathead; 10) Cathedral in Flames.

First of all, I typically ignore bonus tracks when considering albums, so please note that wherever a discrepancy exists between the LP tracklist and the CD, I will be reviewing the LP version.  

This is the first proper album by Coil, an industrial and avantgarde band that always dwelled in the darker recesses of the human condition, to put it very mildly.  A lot of this might have sounded shocking in 1984, but now it comes off as if they're just trying to be edgy.  I mean, look at the title!  You can't tell me Coil weren't proclaiming themselves the long-awaited vanguard of filth with a title like that.

Of course, there are songs like "The Spoiler", which seem to deliberately bludgeon me with their repetitive obnoxiousness.  The fact that that one tries to inject some gravitas with that waltz meter only makes me hate it more.  

But other times, this thing is done well.  We have these long trances of mechanical beats, droning synths, and hideous guitar tones, all while John Balance bleats out the same vocal mantra: a recipe for monotonous disaster, yet there's just enough subtle dynamism in there to make it work.  Case in point with "Solar Lodge", which I point out specifically for the grating guitar solos that remind me of what Lou Reed was doing on "I Heard Her Call My Name" and whatever Can threw in during their freakier passages.  So it's a hard equilibrium to maintain, but they manage it more often than not.

The opening "Ubu Noir" reminds me of something Leland Kirby might do, with those tape loops of what should be joyful, jazzy brass instead becoming a harbinger of damnation by forces beyond anything our puny minds can comprehend.  That leads us into "Panic", probably the closest thing to a danceable song on here, which beats us over the head with a demented swagger that I can't deny-- almost as if Depeche Mode had been left to starve in the dark for a few weeks before picking up their instruments again.  That's what I need these days, in fact: less of that phony idealism and more acknowledgement of where the human id truly leads us when the lights are out.

So, if I'm able to praise the themes of this album, why did I only rate it a six?  Mostly, because I appreciate this album more than I enjoy it.  Tracks like "At the Heart of It All" are nicely atmospheric and eerie, but still come off more as soundtrack material than anything else, so I can't see myself putting this album on outside of a D&D session or something.  

Or for contemplating the rotten center of depravity that dwells within all men, of course.

One-Album Wonders: Unruly Dogs

"I'm a lost dog, running 'round the park, 'cause I really wanna see you again"

Genres: pop rock, indie
Recording decades: 2010s

Known personnel:
Andy Burns

Album release year: 2012

Rating: 8/10

Track Listing: 1) Prologue; 2) Big City Lips; 3) Lost Dog; 4) Sweaty Wiv You; 5) I'll Bite You; 6) Freaky Weather; 7) Small Faces; 8) I Am What I Am; 9) Walking the Dog.

Oh wow, 2012 and there's not a drum machine in sight (or maybe there is and I just can't hear it), which means this album was doomed from the beginning.  I say this half-jokingly, but Unruly Dogs seem to be plenty clever in their single half-pop, half-rock release.  The impressive variety of these eight songs (plus the short "Prologue") ensures the listener is never bored.  The guys drift from straight-ahead pop rock ("Big City Lips") to mid-tempo dance pop ("Small Faces") to mellow contemporary ("Walking the Dog") to even electronic-turned-salsa ("Sweaty Wiv You").  Sure, you won't expect to see any of these songs on a "best of" list, but just because they're not earth-shattering in any sense, doesn't mean they don't still make for a great listening experience.  

On top of the variety, the continuous dog metaphors throughout keep things interesting and give the album a healthy dose of humor.  That theme sure gives the lyrics a greater resonance: case in point with the Track 5 chorus: "I like you / I like you / But I'll bite you / If you liiieee tooo meeee", for instance-- or Track 8's assertion that "I might be growing up / But I'm still the same pup!".  Yes, silly little touches like this are, indeed, enough to make me forgive track 7 for the laughable declaration that the Small Faces invented the concept album (I assume they mean Ogden's Nut Gone Flake, which I'm struggling to restrain my thoughts on at the moment).

Regardless, this is a smartly humorous album of freely-enjoyable indie pop rock, all the better for its compactness, and it shows a band willing to put in the time to balance out the work.  Count me as an Unruly Dogs fan, but we have yet to hear more from these guys, which is a real shame.