PAWN HEARTS

One of the darkest and most apocalyptic albums ever released, and I love every second of it. A bleak trip through Peter Hammill's psyche (circa 1971) over his fellow generators' percolating melodies. Their sound takes the original incarnation of King Crimson to punkish extremes as organ and saxophone are mangled to fit to these dark, stately melodies. Lemmings looks outward toward and condemns a chaotic world over precise drumming and David Jackson's harsh sax. Hammill's shows why Fripp would call him the "hendrix of the voice" (or something like that) 20 years later with his theatrical croons and shrieks, which make lines like "clouds are piled in mountain shapes" into predictions of impending demise. The Man-Erg is an introspective piece which starts as a piano ballad and ends as a hymn and a menacing stacatto figure duking it out. A Plague of Lighthouse Keepers is the sound of a band imploding over the course of 20 minutes. And not a note is wasted.