THE VROOOM SESSIONS 1994

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.