THE VROOOM SESSIONS 1994

This is a great collection of rehearsal and songs. Very good the track 11 "one Time" with no vocals from Belew like the original, this is a good demo. The other tracks sounds very well too. I like this album because i love King Crimson, but is only a good album not more.

A normal thing to do for King Crimson before recording an album, is to rent a studio, play a few composed parts, jam a lot and eventually hope something good will come out of it. Through the King Crimson Collectors Club we can now experience what they did during these sessions. Next to this release, sessions from 1983 (Champaign-Urbana) and 1997 (Nashville) are available. The VROOOM sessions were attended by the double trio and were a rehearsal prior to the recording of the VROOOM (1994) mini-album. These sessions took place April and May 1994.

On this release you can mainly hear improvs and some composed pieces. The title usually explains what you can expect from the song. "Bass Groove" is build around a bass groove, "Monster Jam" starts off as a soundscape but soon builds to a scary, heavy track (like the end of "When I Say Stop, Continue"). "Funky Jam" is funky (just a "Fashionable" by the way)."Slow Mellow" is a nice little tune of guitar and bass. Familiar tracks are "No Questions Asked", which would develop to "Sex, Sleep, Eat, Drink, Dream" and "One Time", both are without vocals.

This is a good release, even though the tracks are not yet finished or completely worked out. This release does mark the beginning of yet another chapter in the fabulous Crimson history.

If you heard the Vrooom EP then you sure must have noted the When I Say Stop, Continue improvisation. Now imagine a whole 45 minutes of this and you get an idea of what this VROOOM Sessions is all about.

Bass Groove is excellent. An insistently galloping bass and percussion lays the groundwork, Fripp and Belew add beautiful frippertronics and guitar-synth soundscapes. It has a really dark and threatening atmosphere, a must for fans of Nebelnest and Nil. Fashionable is a fairly standard funk improvisation. Not bad but not particularly memorable.

Monster Jam. 8.30 essential minutes of dark RIO. Just like the opening tracks this is a must for fans of Univers Zero and Guapo. Beautiful ambient dissonance on pounding tribal beats and dark rumbling bass.

Slow Mellow brings some harmonious comfort after the preceding violence. It's a very warm dialogue between slowly fading guitar chords and bass guitar picking. Krim 3 is more rocking and shows the band improvising with themes that would be used on the forthcoming album. Funky Jam is similar to Fashionable. It's slightly more engaging but still not entirely convincing. Maybe I'm not into funky jams.

No Questions Asked is a premature instrumental version of Sex Sleep Eat Drink Dream. Hardly necessary. Both the short soundscape Adrian's Coulds and Calliope, an improvisation around world beats aren't really going anywhere. One Time is an instrumental version of the known song. Perfect for a little karaoke party at home. Booga Looga finds Crimson struggling to get a groove going but it doesn't really happen.

Overall, a good set of instrumental improvisations recorded during sessions predating the Thrak album. They announce much of what would follow on the ProjeKct albums in the second half of the 90's and they offer a glimpse of the darker side of modern Crimson. If they had included When I Say Stop, Continue I could have considered 3 solid stars, but in its actual form, I feel there's a track missing. 3 stars-lite. Not a must.

This is not a bad set of song. It's not great either, however. This is a recording of some of the sessions leading up to the release of VROOOM and Thrak. Mostly, this is a collection of jams, where the band was hoping to get some material that they could work into songs. Specifically, there are early instrumental versions of what would become <(>Sex Sleep Eat Drink Dream and One Time. I thing there may be a snippet of the main guitar line from Cage at one point.

The jams are very listenable, but many of the "songs" are obviously undeveloped. Not a necessary album to own, but not bad.

In late 1999, King Crimson's collectors' club put out a compilation of outtakes recorded by the band's "double trio" lineup in 1994, titled The Vrooom Sessions. Several of these songs were later reworked or re-recorded for subsequent albums, but there are some neat cuts here. Considering these are not fully-formed songs, I won't dwell on this release for too long.

"Bass Groove" is exactly what it advertises, with the overall atmosphere being dark and moody, and "Fashionable" is funky and could have fit in on Discipline. "Monster Jam" is too long, but it's a great way for the two drummers to show off. Meanwhile, "Slow Mellow" takes its name too seriously and is an incredibly long three minutes. "Krim 3" is fantastic, with a jagged, bouncy groove. (It was later reworked for an Adrian Belew solo release.) 

"Funky Jam" is fantastic, and?wait, I've heard this before! This is the "alternative version" of "Matte Kudasai", isn't it? At least, I thought it was, based on the version of the album I've had on my hard drive since 2010 or so. Was this just mislabeled?

Yes, it was. This is how I found out wherever I got my digital copy of Discipline from had a mislabeled song on it. Well, this is embarrassing. I looked up the real alternate version of "Matte Kudasai", and it's only minimally different from the canonical version. That is to say, I'm still not nuts about it. "Funky Jam" holds up, though, and I'm happy to have some proper provenance on this matter now.

"No Questions Asked" would eventually become "Sex Sleep Eat Drink Dream", and an early version of "One Time" also appears here. "Calliope" is weird, bouncy, and too long; but it's fun, and another great percussion showcase. The closing "Booga Looga" has a vaguely Western vibe to it, and it's a decent enough cut. 

The Vrooom Sessions is a pleasant collection. It's far from essential, but it shows a side of King Crimson's songwriting that isn't just endless, airy improvisation.

Review originally posted here: theeliteextremophile.com/2024/04/15/deep-dive-king-crimson/