Discipline (1981)

 

Artist: King Crimson
Release Year: 1981

Rating: 9/10

Track Listing: 1) Elephant Talk; 2) Frame by Frame; 3) Matte Kudasai; 4) Indiscipline; 5) Thela Hun Ginjeet; 6) The Sheltering Sky; 7) Discipline.

A musical Rubik’s Cube.  Look at the cover art for a perfect visual interpretation!

To paraphrase Fripp himself, this incarnation of King Crimson is "a way of doing" the Eighties.  New Wave is here, for better or for worse, and Robert Fripp somehow managed to incorporate the best elements of the genre into the King Crimson fold without submitting to the horrendous evils of synths.

First, the personnel.  Fripp and Broof are back, but the other two slots are filled by the band's first Americans: former Talking Heads associate Adrian Belew and Chapman stick wizard Tony Levin.  Belew certainly let the wild paranoia of David Byrne rub off on him, and never before has a Crimson lead vocalist stood out as much as Belew does.  In fact, he almost seems to stand as an equal to Fripp here: right from the wibbly-wobbly intro of “Elephant Talk”, it’s clear that we are in new territory.  The music is more open, more danceable, and – dare I say it – friendlier this time around.

And speaking of that opening track, it’s so hard not to smile along as Adrian Belew shouts out those lists of alliterative synonyms, cheekily noting in the fourth verse that “these are words with a D this time”.  No way would this band have been so self-referential in earlier years – now there’s your proof of evolution, right right.  Then we get obsessive and unstable ramblings on “Indiscipline”, both narratively and musically, with lines like “I repeat myself when under stress, I repeat myself when under stress…” providing another nugget of black comedy, right before we’re catapulted back into instrumental madness—and be sure to marvel at Bill Bruford’s claustrophobic drumming!  “Thela Hun Ginjeet” continues the theme, but even better, almost like we’ve gone further down the river in Apocalypse Now.  This is the infamous true story of Adrian Belew getting mugged in London, recorded not an hour after it happened, but the constant return to that intense, adrenaline-drenched instrumental suggests both a fit of nervous sweats and some deeper meaning, almost like some kind of postmodernist piece.  Serendipity is an incredible thing.

Yet, in spite of the increase in humor and whimsy, there’s no denying that this is still the super-professional and terrifying world of King Crimson.  The dizzying, interlocking guitar work and polyrhythms of “Frame by Frame” and “Discipline” – the latter of which also includes some refreshing elements of African music and gamelan, of all things – is proof enough of that.  The lengthy, atmospheric jam of “The Sheltering Sky” is an underrated gem, too: just listen to those gorgeous whistles and swoops and scrapes and everything else Belew can make his guitar sound like.  It really does feel like lying under the clouds in a strange, empty land, and I can’t complain for a moment.  Finally, the ballad “Matte Kudasai” is just untouchable, from the gorgeous verses to the bittersweet, yearning chorus, to even the mournful seagull effects Belew throws in.

And let’s not forget Bruford and Levin: an unstoppable rhythm section, no doubt, even if the band’s new style doesn’t allow them to be the same “flying brick wall” that Bruford and Wetton were in the Seventies.  No, this is a more mathematical pairing of drum and bass, allowing more space for Fripp and Belew to weave their endless knots of hyper-complex guitar calculus.  Sexy it isn’t, unless you’re into some weird niches; but when the goal is a futuristic, world music-influenced engineering-meets-art project, the framework could not have been better than this.  It’s a softer, more pliable and flexible grounding for the looser-in-substance, but tighter-in-form posture that the band would adopt for the remainder of the incarnation.

All in all, there’s not a second on this album that I don’t like, and I almost rated it a ten…but something stays my hand.  Is it the lack of the spiritual universality that I feel on Larks’, or is it just the disappearance of that crunchy guitar tone that we heard all over the Seventies’ KC?  Maybe it’s Fripp’s partial abdication of the throne.  Just don’t tell him that.