IN THE COURT OF THE CRIMSON KING

Ok, I can't postpone it any longer now. Time to review the grand birth of prog rock. It's unofficially awarded most significant prog album in my own poll lately and guess what ... I can actually agree with this.

One of the reasons I waited so long with this review is my problem with rating it. This must be just about the only album in history I can actually reward with all 5 ratings. I will try to explain that by saying that in my most negative way of looking at this album I could give it one star because the music on it is not really my favorite style at all. I would pick all terrible moments (Moonchild's last ten minutes f.i.) and use them as a reason to give the one star. Same with two stars but then I would say there are some nice moments on some of the songs and use that as explanation. The most likely rating for my taste (and it has crossed my mind to actually give this) would be the three stars. Two very good songs (I talk to the wind and the title track), two that have good moments (Epitaph and the Schizoid song) and one that's more or less awful (Moonchild). This would justify a three star rating and in case I'm in a good and generous mood I could also give four stars for this view of the album.

But you know what I'm going to do ? I'm going to crank it up a notch and grant this album a bonus star for historical significance combined with my generosity and then I could give the full five here (like so many obviously did before me). And that's what it's going to be. I feel I've done enough harm to my reputation by giving the one star to Lark's Tongue (which I would do again if I could do it all over) and let's face it: this debut is indeed much much better and more bearable than the latter "masterpiece"'. So five it is and now if you'll excuse me I go back to my beloved neoprog where I belong ...