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.
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