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 we can 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 a 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 driving music, 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 making 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 you've never seen the video of Robert Fripp's wife Toyah demonstrating how one can indeed dance in 5/4, go check it out, so that you can silence any of your friends who complain about such petty things.

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.