Sonntag, 23. Dez 2007, 21:01
Due to very understandable reasons, this episode will be mostly about King Crimson. Since I possess quite a lot of KC material, this writeup will give me a chance to review the band's career and output as a whole on a chronological timeline. So please bear with me even though I might end up sounding like a fucking history teacher.
For some strange reason I still don't own King Crimson's first two albums. Shame on me!
Oh, and as this comes in such a suitable time: Merry Christmas, Happy Hanukkah, Komfortable Kwanzaa, Jubilant Yule, Satisfactory Saturnalia – choose your poison!
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By Lizard, King Crimson's third release, guitarist Robert Fripp had effectively taken control of the band, as he and lyricist/illuminator Peter Sinfield were the only original members left. Fripp is credited for all the music on the album, while Sinfield's lyrics have reached a certain extreme. I've read a creditable analysis about the lyrics of the "Lizard" suite once, but still, with lines like "each afternoon you train baboons to sing" and "'mercy!' cried the clown, 'I am a TV!'", my bullshit detector reaches the red zone frequently.
Lizard balances between menacing and playful, with the opening "Cirkus" being an example of the former while "Indoor Games" and the Beatles allegory "Happy Family" make good use of the horn section. It's exactly the contributions of the wind instrumentalists, as well as the jazz pianist Keith Tippett, that make Lizard the most pronouncedly jazzy work in all of King Crimson's catalogue. Miles Davis' seminal Sketches of Spain comes to mind as a probable influence.
The second half of the record is taken by the "Lizard" suite, a 23-minute suite in four parts and the longest composition in all of King Crimson's career. As long-winded it is, it's also effective and even symphonic, although never too grandiloquent: from a sad verse/upbeat chorus part through a long jazzy bolero it makes its way to a powerful battle scene and, finally, ends on a guitar solo and circus music. The first part features Jon Anderson of Yes as a guest vocalist, and he does a marvelous job unlike the main vocalist Gordon Haskell, whose crummy performance on the album leaves a lot to be desired. You'd expect Fripp to understand that friends don't always make the optimal bandmates – a mistake he'd repeat very soon…
…by enlisting a friend, singer Boz Burrell as the vocalist and bassist, despite Burrell not knowing how to play the damn thing. Fripp showed him the ropes and off they were. (Eventually it was clear Boz was not the right person for King Crimson, as proved by his short stint, but he was to find fame later as the frontman of Bad Company, so he got lucky in the end.)
Islands is King Crimson at their most static, pastoral and drowsy. The two longest tracks which bookend the album are more concerned about lulling the listener into Mediterranean daydreams than actually progressing anywhere. Islands also features a Fripp composition for strings and winds – "Prelude: Song of the Gulls" is only remarkable in its unremarkability. "Letters" is a scathing, poetic narrative of infidelity replete with romantic grandeur, and while the tune itself is pretty forgettable, it is arranged craftily. For something completely different, "Ladies of the Road" is a rare attempt of a tongue-in-cheek KC track (about groupies – evidently even King Crimson had some) but turns out merely banal.
Islands has always been a rare visitor to my CD player, and I don't think things are going to change in the future. To me, it's the most forgettable King Crimson record I've heard and shares practically none of the positive qualities I associate with the band.
King Crimson - Larks' Tongues in Aspic
The Islands lineup had an approximate half-life of a nanosecond, and soon after touring the US in promotion of the album, Fripp found himself the only remaining King Crimson. Time for a new band, he thought, and promptly mustered a new one in a blink of an eye. Sinfield was gone too, and a new lyricist came in the form of Richard Palmer-James, another Englishman with less tendency to search up pretentious words from a thesaurus.
When listening to Larks' Tongues in Aspic it's immediately obvious that with a new band came also a sharp turn in the overall sound. On LTiA King Crimson embraces the loud, crunching guitar rock it first laid its hands on on the debut album's classic cut "21st Century Schizoid Man".
Larks' Tongues in Aspic had its title picked by the percussion maverick Jamie Muir. Whatever the rationale behind the name, the phrase was to become one of KC's strange, recurring trademarks as well as the name of not one but two instrumental compositions on the album. The two parts of "Lark's Tongues in Aspic" bookend the record, but not in the symmetrical way Pink Floyd's "Shine On You Crazy Diamond", for instance, would later do. Instead, the works are highly individual and separate even though they do share common motifs. Part I opens with the gentle tinkle of finger cymbals and mbira, but soon segues into the roar of Fripp's angular guitar, then lets each member step into the spotlight before summing it all up. Part II instead is an odd-meter heavy metal romp with brilliant rhythmical interplay between the guitar/bass axis of Fripp and John Wetton.
Three of the four remaining songs feature John Wetton's smoky vocals. He wasn't the best singer in the history of King Crimson (and is clearly out of his comfort zone on "Exiles"), but he was the first one since Greg Lake to really fit in with the band. His bass playing stands out as well for its power, audacity, and the fact that it's in every sense on a par with the guitar, which is what I found particularly inspiring when first acquainting myself with the 70s Crimson.
King Crimson - Starless and Bible Black
Out with Jamie Muir: the eccentric percussionist took a hasty leave in order to become a Buddhist monk. (He came back, eventually, but didn't return to KC.)
Four of the eight tracks on Starless and Bible Black are live improvisations, although in the case of "The Mincer" some vocals have been added afterwards. "We'll Let You Know" grows to a rigid funk and ends before accomplishing anything, while "Trio" is a rare moment of four-way telepathy and the result sounds almost like it was planned beforehand. The most exciting of the improvs is the title track, which is also the longest of the four, and thus has enough time to grow into an unnerving tapestry of sound.
Then there are the compositions: to this day, the rhythm in the verse of "The Great Deceiver" completely fucks with my head. The chorus is a blast but the track runs out of fuel before the end. "Lament" is a fine track, fitting two separate parts and an off-the-wall coda into its meagre four-minute span. "The Night Watch" is a romantic, beautiful if not a bit soppy ode to lyricist Palmer-James' favourite painting. "Fracture" is like a dissertation on the whole-tone scale and, well, occasionally sounds like it too. Still, after the guitar noodling turns into thematic development, the track crunches very fervently forwards and becomes a hit instead of a miss.
Throughout the years, Starless and Bible Black has been alternately my favourite and my least favourite of the three Wetton-era discs. Right now I consider it the weakest one, mostly due to its incoherence. Even if Larks' Tongues in Aspic sprawls a bit all over the place, it had more of a common structure and framework than Starless and Bible Black. There's an important difference between "an album" and "a collection of tracks".
Even though the band seemed to find a modicum of stability during the 70's, the world was seemingly not yet ready for two consecutive King Crimson albums with the same lineup. David Cross left the band after Starless and Bible Black and only appears as a guest on Red. The more the merrier goes the common saying, but getting reduced to a power trio obviously made the remaining members of King Crimson bring out all their best qualities. Especially John Wetton's bass playing, heavy as it was on the previous two records, becomes an earth-shattering force. Red is pure heavy metal through and through.
Here Fripp continued to fuse his unorthodoxly, angular conceptions of melody and harmony into a rock'n'roll context. Both "Red" and "One More Red Nightmare" hint towards a skewed version of blues, where the common I-IV-V chord progression is bent into a tritonal malformation. "Red" is a powerful instrumental, alternating between the smoothly ascending melodies of the intro and outro, a crushing guitar riff and the sepulchral cello break in the middle. "One More Red Nightmare" is a more light-hearted track featuring handclaps, lyrics recounting a traveler's nightmare and the furious clang of Bill Bruford's mangled junk cymbal.
"Fallen Angel" fuses a delicate verse and a ripping chorus together into one powerful track, and features one of Wetton's better vocal performances. Finally, "Providence" is probably the best improvisational piece KC put on any of their studio albums: haphazard and meandering as it may be in the beginning, once Bruford comes along the track finds a direction and becomes thrilling and engaging.
Red shows all the best qualities of what King Crimson stood for: focused and stylistically coherent songwriting, dynamic interplay, bold displays of raw power, revealing the hidden beauty of ugliness.
Wait. I feel like I forgot something.
Oh yes. The most astonishing piece of rock music ever written.
"Starless", the definitive epilogue for both the record and a whole era of King Crimson. The sun is slowly going down as Wetton sings the plaintive verses; dark clouds begin to gather into the clear sky as Fripp's guitar creeps higher and higher; when the tension reaches its zenith, the clouds burst and torrents of rain pour down accompanied by Mel Collins' sax solo; finally, the sky clears again as the mournful main theme reappears, underlined by the crushing bass. As the final rays die, the sun sets and darkness takes over. Not just for the night, but rather forevermore.
Fast forward to a new decade. After the collapse of the Red-era lineup Fripp put the Crimson King into an indefinite state of hibernation and focused on other projects, some of which were music-related (collaborations with artists such as Peter Gabriel, Brian Eno and David Bowie) and some weren't (spiritual self-development according to the teachings of G. I. Gurdjieff). In 1981, Fripp formed a new group, tentatively called Discipline, with old pal Bill Bruford behind the kit and two new members: bass/chapmanstick player Tony Levin and guitarist-vocalist Adrian Belew. The new guys were both accomplished players in their own right: Belew had played with Frank Zappa among others, while Tony Levin had been a session bassist for approximately everyone. They were both from the States as well, and this was indeed the first step of the slowly progressing Americanisation (or should I say Americanization?) of the band.
Eventually it was clear that this wasn't a new group at all – it was the same ol' King Crimson in a different suit, and promptly the moniker was thawed out. The fact that using the more recognizable name would elevate the group's visibility probably helped too.
This lecture on King Crimson's history endeth here.
Discipline's most pronounced influences come from very different sources. First, there's the US new wave rock, an offshoot of punk with less concern towards anarchy and abrasion. The second major influence is traditional Indonesian gamelan music filtered through the minimalist tendencies of 20th century composers. Rather little of the sound of the previous incarnation of the band has carried over: progressive rock as a genre was dead or at least smelled that way, the lineup crucially different in composition, the lead singer very different in style and timbre. Fripp had, for the first time in his entire career, enlisted another guitar player alongside himself and had to change his approach accordingly. This was King Crimson's most grooving period, and the brothers-in-arms Bruford and Levin proved to be the most grooving rhythm section in the band's history.
"Elephant Talk" is a good example of the new wave stance, with its catchy and heavily grooving attitude, the quirky encyclopedic lyrics talking about talking (Talking Heads? Wait, I'll get there very soon now!), and of course Adrian Belew's slavish mimicking of David Byrne's vocal style. (Told you.) Belew's voice is a divisive issue and while I, after a period of uncertainty, ended up mostly liking him, he occasionally still rubs me the wrong way. (A quick aside: my girlfriend, who is admirably tolerant even towards my more awkward tastes, never fails to mention upon hearing "Elephant Talk" how much it annoys her.)
The rock gamelan approach is taken to its extreme in the closing "Discipline" which lives up to both its name and, curiously, the intricate Celtic knot pattern in the album cover. It's a rigorous exercise in polymetric rhythm with two guitars interlocking their simple (only in a melodic sense – the song itself is an absolute bitch to play), repeating lines to each other and shifting in and out of synchronization to produce an intricate fabric of notes. The technique is fundamentally same as what Steve Reich utilizes in a lot of his works.
The rest of the tracks fall somewhere in between these stylistical bookends and share elements of both approaches, plus a heavy dose of postmodernist lyrical stylings and, occasionally, a weird sense of humor. The sweetly lilting "Matte Kudasai" is practically a remake of "North Star" from Fripp's 1979 solo album Exposure. The remastered edition of Discipline has another version of this as a bonus, the key difference to the original being the addition of a totally superfluous and very annoying guitar line.
Do you know why I called Islands "the most forgettable" KC record instead of calling it "the worst"?
THRaKaTTaK's why.
Now, in the 90s King Crimson produced an album and a track both called "THRAK". ("THRAK" by the way is a non-word, with the whimsical meaning of "the sound of 117 guitars almost striking the same chord simultaneously". This is Frippian humour, and I'm one of the five or so people on Earth who do find it amusing.) "THRAK" is a crushingly heavy instrumental in 5/4, a little exercise in rhythm and counter-rhythm. When performed live, the band used "THRAK" as a starting point for an improvisational jam. THRaKaTTaK is a collection of recordings of said jams, with the THRAK theme both opening and closing the album and six long improvs between them.
Funnily enough none of the jams are actually genuine single takes, but rather each of them is spliced together from a group of recordings, and you can easily pinpoint the exact moments where the cut'n'pastes take place. Maybe there was an inner logic for selecting these specific takes to make up "Mother Hold the Candle Steady While I Shave the Chicken's Lip" and these others to create "This Night Wounds Time", but I really don't know what it could be.
The real problem with WHaKKaRaT is that the improvisations themselves suck a truckload. There are two main reasons for this.
Firstly, they are meandering, abstract and aimless. No structures are built, no themes developed, no telepathic interplay between musicians, no common ground or goal to aim for. Just six musicians (this was the "double trio" period) noodling around, jacking off, making sounds. You're listening to King Crimson, yet "THRaKaTTaK part 1" is very much what you'd expect a group of ADD-diagnosed preschoolers to produce if exposed to a room full of instruments. The improvisations don't echo or hark back to their motherTHRAK all that much; KC could have just as well based the jams on "Humpty Dumpty" or John Cage's "4'33"" as far as I'm concerned.
Secondly, and even more amazingly, the "improvisational" material itself repeats itself between the jams – A LOT. I swear there isn't a single jam here that doesn't contain Belew fucking around with his stupid piano sound always playing the exact same stuff. Yes, those dissonant intervals sure sound fresh and beastly every time! Wait, here's Bruford tinkling with his Magic Marimba again, and now Sir Fripp joins in with his signature descending chromatic scale fragments! Oh boy, nothing spells "innovative, courageous group improvisation" quite like six players each playing their own pre-determined exercises!
It doesn't really help that a lot of the instrumentation is sterile to the hospital-level and beyond – lifeless electronic marimbas, MIDI-controlled piano sounds, various electronic drums, heavily processed guitars and Fripp's stereotypical soundscapes. KRaPaTTaK is like a golem wrought from plastic – ugly, hulking, unintelligent, predestined to failure. But it is, by the ten sephiroth, certainly not forgettable.
The haltingly titled VROOOM VROOOM is the only one of the ridiculous amount of King Crimson live releases that I own so far. I was tempted to get it soon after release after reading the glowing five-star review from Soundi magazine. The double album splits into two: disc one is Live in Mexico City and disc two is Live in New York City. Once again, neither of them is a complete document of a single gig as both albums are stitched together from various consecutive gigs. The good thing is that this serves to minimize the overlap of tracks between the albums. Given that the formation is the double trio and the documented gigs were part of the 1995-1996 THRAK tour, it comes as no surprise that the material leans heavily on the then-recent album: all tracks except the few short interlude pieces get represented, some even on both discs.
Live in Mexico City does not take off strongly: "VROOOM VROOOM" and "Coda: Marine 475" are flat-out rehashes of two older tracks ("Red" from, uh, Red and "Coda: I Have A Dream" from The ConstruKction of Light) and do not serve to pique the interest. (Curiously, also "Red" got played on the Mexico dates and is represented here.) "Dinosaur" is enjoyable, the drum duet "B'Boom" acceptable… but after listening to the trainwreck that is THRaKaTTaK, I seriously am not in the mood for "THRAK" and its degenerative wankery they call improvisation.
Things pick up with a few choice cuts from the 70s material. "Talking Drum" has Belew emulating a violin sound with his guitar, and its inevitable successor "Larks' Tongues in Aspic part II" is played a lot faster than originally: it simply burns, and like on Focus' classic "Hocus Pocus", the frenetic live tempo suits it so well that one thinks it's exactly how it should have been done in the first place. The 70s tracks lack in the bass department though – the Chapman Stick, however ingenious as an instrument, just can't emit the vicious growl of an overdriven Fender Jazz.
The biggest surprise here is the cover track – "Prism", a composition for two percussionists by Pierre Favre, a Swiss drummer. Bruford and Mastelotto get to clatter various beatable objects together for a few minutes, conjuring ritualistic pulses and complex patterns of rhythm. It's strange, unexpected, possibly even out of place – and absolutely fascinating. Another surprise is the presence of the KC über-classic "21st Century Schizoid Man", a song they've only performed a handful of times with Belew. (Note that this implies, today, that the song has barely been played at all in over 30 years.) This performance is pumped up as well – they burn through the instrumental unison with such hyperactivity it's a wonder they found time to breathe. Old they might be, but they sure don't sound like it!
Live in New York City is a bit more focused, as there are no 70s or older tracks, just 80s and THRAK stuff. The disc takes off with another showcase for the percussion axis: "Conundrum", a short conundrum of mathematical number progressions transformed into unison drumming. Then they burst into "Thela Hun Ginjeet", complete with Belew's heat-in-the-concrete-jungle narration coming from tape. I can't help but compare the performances of the 80s tracks to the takes on the phenomenal '84 live Absent Lovers, and sadly "Thela" comes out short in this unfair comparison. On the other hand "Elephant Talk" and "Frame by Frame" are not at all inferior to their old counterparts, and the real winner here is "Indiscipline" – the presence of two drummers suits this track fabulously and Belew delivers the spoken word with fantastic vigor and comedy. (I still have to note that Absent Lovers gives a lot of support to the assertion that King Crimson didn't really need an expanded rhythm section – Bruford and Levin already play like four men!)
The newer material doesn't suffer from such bias. "People" has a great, catchy chorus but would function better as a more compact track, without the unnecessary prolongation. "One Time" is sweetly maudlin, "Walking on Air" Beatlesque and ethereal, and "Sex Sleep Eat Drink Dream" gets almost funky – at least until the mindbending polyrhythms kick in. As for "THRAK"… you know the deal. The low-frequency collaborators Gunn and Levin get their own, completely forgettable number in "Two Sticks", and Adrian's solo performance of the Beatles' "Free As A Bird", complete with guitar-synth-piano accompaniment and lyrics-forgetting, should have been left out as well.
VROOOM VROOOM is a very spanning view on the 90s incarnation of King Crimson. Good tracks and bad tracks spanning four decades, short instrumentals, improvisation, Belew-pop, Frippertronics, innovation, derivation. How could the end result be anything else but wildly uneven, even with the uniformly top-notch performances?
King Crimson - The ConstruKction of Light
After the exits of Bill Bruford and Tony Levin, King Crimson downgraded from the double-trio formation to a four-piece (now with a single Brit surrounded by Americans).
Throughout its career, King Crimson has circled around the concept of blues and attacked it from different angles, although always from a distance. I referred to this in my Red writeup, and here we are to return to the subject with the opening "ProzaKc Blues", complete with the obligatory if parodical "I woke up this morning" lyrics.
The ConstruKction of Light is chock full with backreferences to the band's long career in both music and lyrics: the fourth installment in "Larks' Tongues in Aspic" series; a sequel to the 70s "Fracture" in the form of the instru-metal freakout "FraKctured"; and direct lyrical references to several older tracks. "The World's My Oyster Soup Kitchen Floor Wax Museum" spells out its verbal gimmick in the title and comes off as an overlong novelty track suitcase closed for inventory Amos… whoops, sorry. In the grand spirit of self-referentialism "Larks' Tongues in Aspic part IV" even revisits "FraKctured".
The best piece on the album is the two-part title track featuring intertwining guitars, genuinely interesting thematic variation and development and good vocal delivery. Another great moment appears towards the end of the album, as "Coda: I Have A Dream" contains one of the most fascinating compositional ideas present here: the ingenious cyclic chord progression which modulates a major third downwards every eight bars and reaches its own starting point after 24 bars, becoming an infinite cycle. Combined with the lyrics – a laundry list of human tragedies in the last half a century or so –, one could be tempted to find some hidden symbolism.
I will take this opportunity to mention that Adrian Belew's very recognizable guitar solos are rare in the sense that they can both disgust and fascinate me simultaneously. Bless that balding Strat-wielder and his chronically frenetic vibrato arm! His vocals on the album are great, although often masked with pitchshifters, harmonizers and other funny thingamabobs. And speaking of thingamabobs, on this record Pat Mastelotto plays thingamabobs that sound like crap exclusively instead of real drums! Roland V-Drums, I darn you to heck. At least during the Bruford times they had the courtesy to offer electronic percussion only as a sidedish, not as the full meal.
The ConstruKction of Light is a rather maligned work in the King Crimson canon; and despite its shortcomings, I feel it's even undeservedly so. The album is not outright bad, it's just not quite as inventive or memorable as one would hope it to be. I think time has put a little perspective on it though, as I can nowadays see this album as a necessary milestone in King Crimson's progress towards the new millennium.
King Crimson - Happy With What You Have To Be Happy With
The Happy With What You Have To Be Happy With EP was presented as a sneak peek to the upcoming album and probably served as a kind of a preliminary experiment as well. What it contains are four "real" songs and six tracks of soundscaping, atmospheres, Japanese poems sung through a harmonizer et cetera.
"Happy With What You Have To Be Happy With" is another Belewian strange loop – writing a song about writing a song? Meta as fuck! But since self-referentialism is the new black for King Crimson, it shouldn't be surprising, and makes the title seem fitting. The song is a relatively straightforward (by KC standards at least) "nuevo metal" track and however gimmicky the lyrics are, it has enough in the catchiness department to stick into your head and Belew's vocal has a surprising amount of conviction. This is one of the two songs on the EP that would make an appearance on the 2003 album The Power to Believe, although both in a slightly different form. The other, "Eyes Wide Open", is an adorably pretty ballad that gets a mostly acoustic reading here as opposed to a more electrified performance on the album and ranks easily as the EP's best track.
"Potato Pie" is another appearance of the screw-with-the-blues phenomenon, and boy, this is by far the dullest sequel they've come up with. It's less about skewing the form; on the contrary, the band is now actually trying to bluesify themselves, which they do with the subtlety of a cruise missile, and results are depressing. The band also plows through a live version of "Larks' Tongues in Aspic part IV" plus the coda (abbreviated, sans vocals) and they do it with such precision that everything would be fine and dandy if not for the abhorrent lead guitar sound of Mr. Fripp. It's as if the guitar sound tried to choke itself during the solo – or is this yet another, advanced example of self-reference?
For a surprise ending, the final harmonizer poem "Clouds" hides a secret track, later dubbed "Einstein's Relatives". Not a song, a soundscape or a poem, it's a fun three-minute collage of amusing sound snippets from the studio (yes, recording of a recording!): Adrian toying with vocal effects, Fripp berating someone, little bits and pieces of tracks both known and unknown, ending with an audience chanting the vocal stanza from "The Court of the Crimson King".
King Crimson - The Power to Believe
After the short a cappella introduction King Crimson's first album in the 21st century kicks off with three excellent tracks: "Level Five" is, as its name hints, essentially a fifth part to the Larks' Tongues in Aspic series, and it's easily the most intriguing one since the first two parts. "Eyes Wide Open" makes a reappearance and it sounds even better in this more dynamic setting. "EleKtriK" is another adventurous, instrumental exposition of twin guitar textures.
In stark contrast to all the abovementioned, tightly formed compositions, the four parts of "The Power to Believe" are very free-form and uncohesive and all share a common vocoder-vocal motif but nothing more. Part II is effectively the slithering bass line of "Virtuous Circle", a track from Level Five EP, crossed with the electro-cymbal experimentation piece "Shoganai" from the above-reviewed EP; part III, in turn, has a lot in common with another older EP-only track and live staple "Deception of the Thrush".
In addition to the abovementioned there's also the matter of "Dangerous Curves" being a "Talking Drum" of the 21st decade: a slowly growing crescendo ending with banging feedback. It's a good piece and the best moment comes smack in the middle as Trey Gunn and his Warr guitar (yes, they're both real names – this time Warr is an instrument of Gunn and not vice versa) are let loose. "Facts of Life" instead is a boring, by-the-numbers KC track with shoddy lyrics ("nobody knows / what happens when you die / believe what you want / it doesn't mean you're right / that is a fact of life". Wow, man, just, I mean, wow, and… stuff).
Sonically The Power to Believe is a step up from The ConstruKction of Light. Especially the drum department strikes a healthy balance between non-plastic drum sounds, loops and sampling. I've nothing to complain about the guitar tones either, and Gunn's distorted Warr guitar gives a rough, solid bottom for the twinkling guitars on "EleKtriK", for instance.
An electric ode celebrating the joyous freedoms offered by the motorway? What a German concept! Owing more to the recently deceased electrical music pioneer Karlheinz Stockhausen than any form of rock music, the Teutonic robot quartet Kraftwerk hit their first major success with 1974's Autobahn and went ever since to define the synthesis of man, machine and music.
Autobahn is very much programmatic; the compositions and arrangements are expressions of real-life themes, and could almost me called very simplistic "tone poems". The title track itself is a side-long voyage along a highway, complete with engine-revving, radio-tuning, honking and overtaking noises. Also featured are naïve lyrics, mostly pointing out over and over again that we're drivin', drivin', drivin' down the highway and sung painfully out of key by Hütter and/or Schneider. Musically very minimalistic and not very expressive, "Autobahn" wears off its welcome several times within its 23-minute duration.
"Mitternacht" ("Midnight"), a dark collage of nocturnal sounds, and "Morgenspaziergang" ("Morning Walk"), a delicate canon melody interspersed with synthetic birdsong, are much shorter and relatively more successful in their concepts. In between "Autobahn" and these two comes "Kometenmelodie" in two arrangements – first a slow, dirgey and sepulchral version, then a happier, motorik-driven take.
Kraftwerk's expression is quite separated from that of rock music in general, so it's fitting that its virtues lie far as well. Melodically trivial, rhythmically straightforward and harmonically void, the general concern of Autobahn is the cavalcade of timbres coaxed out from the mass of synthesizers and a krautrockish way of building extended forms from simple themes. While groundbreaking when released, time hasn't been that kind on Kraftwerk's proto-techno.
Another trio featuring Pentti Dassum, the frontman of late Finnish jazzpunk eccentrics Deep Turtle and one of my all-time favourite guitar players. Stylistically the two bands aren't actually that remote from each other: both share a common love of combining the rudely straightforward abrasion of punk
with more nuanced and discreet forms of expression – swingin' jazz, a bit of latin, a touch of surf, a sprinkle of ambient.
Kroko leaves more open to interpretation, however: there's more elbow room for expression in these brief sonic explorations than in the intricately constructed musical mazes of Deep Turtle. This is also emphasized by the total lack of vocals on Furia, and the fact that some songs are completely or partially recorded in a live setting. Being a through-compositional freak I do miss the fabulous songcraft of Deep Turtle and their phenomenally tight teamwork. Furia feels quit uneven, as the ideas here are occasionally underdeveloped or just buried too far behind the free improvisation and less interesting bits. Still, the good moments are here and there: the jazzy angularity of "Agent Weird", the counterpoint and jangle of "Budala Ptiza", the relaxing but austere sentimentality of "Setzur au naturelle"
The familiarly quirky/stupid sense of humor is at work here as well: track titles include puns like "Polanski After Ski", nonsensicalities à la "On the Sunny Side of the Meat", Turtle-neologisms like "Bummärtti", and a pair of tracks called "Ambient Ballad" (parts I and II), which they unsurprisingly are not. The listening experience does get quite unnerving when the band switches without warning from a noisefest to ambience and back again.
So sadly this isn't Deep Turtle, and probably not even the next best thing, but I still like some of this, to an extent.
Kuha. - Hei, täältä tulee Kuha.
Kuha., correctly spelled with a period, has been developing their awkward brand of progressive rock-metal for longer than ten years now without a single compromise given to any direction. Their idiosyncrasy and artistic tendencies have manifested in a multitude of ways, the most obvious of which is their dense, absurd and even dadaistic humor. It will probably be all but lost with non-Finnish speakers, but then again, I wouldn't expect Kuha. to have many listeners outside Finland. Hei, täältä tulee Kuha. is the band's second, self-released album from 2003: in the past few years they've signed a contract, released two more albums and grown both stylistically and in popularity.
The band has a stunning amount of chops for which they find considerably musical uses. Stylistical flirtations range from disco ("Diskoteekki") to funk ("Vesiapina Albert") to Slavic lamentation ("Ravurin loppuelämä"), sometimes done satirically, sometimes in earnest. The biggest problem is that many of the tracks have a good motif or idea and even develop it accordingly, but then fall flat, do not get the proper resolve they require and end awkwardly, abruptly.
The frontman and lead singer Juha Kuha is a fine vocalist in his own right, but his major hindrance is that he has precisely one tone: the declaring, pompous, strained one. Many of the tracks are sung by a guesting ex-member though, and it's curious that I find him more pleasant than the main man. Lyrically Kuha. plays completely in it's own ballpark, and while I can take some of their absurdism, not all of it goes down that well.
After all this negativity, a few paragraphs must be dedicated for their 25-minute grand epic "Kalifi myy mustaa valoa" ("The Caliph Sells Black Light") alone, not only because it is a natural centerpiece of the album, but also because it's, if I may put it bluntly, fucking amazing. There's probably a lot of parody at work here, as the piece is divided into no less than 16 individually titled tracks, but regardless of that it's remarkable how well the song flows forward through the myriad of changes. Sporting a good amount of vocal and instrumental melodies both brilliantly catchy and absolutely demented – sometimes simultaneously –, clever riffs and complex rhythms in various time signatures, rich arrangements, instrumental interludes and a smorgasbord of genres from stoneheaded metal to Elvis-style rock'n'roll and disco, "Kalifi myy mustaa valoa" is a fascinatingly rich work. It's not really comparable to any of the "big", classic epics from the 70s, but such comparisons aren't required either, since the song stands firmly on its own merits.
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New acquirements:
Celtic Frost - Monotheist
Circle - Katapult
Circle - Rakennus
CMX - Pedot
CMX - Kuolemaantuomitut CDS
CMX - Talvikuningas
Contrive - The Meaning Unseen
The Dillinger Escape Plan - Under the Running Board EP
The Dillinger Escape Plan - Calculating Infinity
Led Zeppelin - IV
Morian - Away from the Sun CDS
Morian - Sentinels of the Sun
Nile - In Their Darkened Shrines
Nile - Annihilation of the Wicked
Nile - Ithyphallic
Pat Metheny Group - Imaginary Day Live / Speaking of Now Live 2DVD
Pink Floyd - A Saucerful of Secrets
Pink Floyd - Meddle
Einojuhani Rautavaara - Vigilia
Elliott Smith - XO
Tomahawk - Anonymous