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.